Essence Of Creativity

SO what exactly is the essence of creativity and how do we acquire such a thing? At the gaming company Valve they have adopted a new technique to promote creativity. They did this by completely changing up their business model to encourage people to pick and choose which projects they want to work in. This is done because it promotes creativity? Why? Because it enables people to work on what they are actually interested in rather than slaving away on a project that does not stimulate them in any way. As Steve Jobs once said, "They only way to do great work is to love what you do." I completely agree with this because working on  a project that you have no desire to complete is mentally straining. In reading about this I came to the conclusion that I can incorporate this idea into our current briefs. Although there is a set guideline that we must follow I can promote my creativity by adding in aspects that interest me. This could turn a boring compositing project into something that I am genuinely interested in.

This brings about the issue of employers possibly drowning out creativity by reducing the amount of freedom given to workers. This is why I love the design of the brief that we have been given. It has structure and yet at the same time it allows for a lot of freedom to explore. Looking at this fact makes me ponder if creativity is not just in our hands but also in the hands of the brief being presented.

I also think that we need to collaborate ideas in a group more often rather than brainstorming ourselves. After all creativity is not about efficiency but instead heavily relies on serendipity. Happy mistakes sometimes make the most brilliant ideas. Perhaps combining our creativity instead of working as individuals would help us generate more innovative ideas. This brings me to the point that all of us are for some reason making robots for the compositing project. We did not decide this as a group, but rather as individuals. It seems almost embedded in our brains to interpret "non-organic" as a robotic creature. Perhaps this is a sign that we are all using the same thought processes to create our composite. I think we need to change the way we approach ideas in general and reprogram ourselves to think not about what has been done, rather what hasn't been done. We need to interrupt our subconscious mind and break our usual patterns of thinking.

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have" Steve Jobs.