On Creativity

Missingham, Greg, 2010, Greg Missingham, in: From Theory to Practice: 39 Opinions, in: Williams, Anthony; Michael J Ostwald & Hedda Haugen Askland, 2010, Creativity, Design and Education: Theories, Positions and Challenges, Sydney: Australian Teaching Council, pp. 103-106. Learning & greg Missingham the university oF MelBourne What is ‘creativity’? A proposition is creative if: primarily teaching architectural design and design approaches and methods, and supervising rhds, greg Missingham is particularly interested in design teaching as a research vehicle. his other main research interest is the public realms of major institutional buildings (as in the Justice sector). Formally, greg is associate dean (teaching and learning) of the Faculty of architecture, Building and planning at the university of Melbourne. greg has taught at four schools of architecture in the state of victoria and at southeastern university, nanjing. he has lectured elsewhere in australia, china and indonesia and published in australasia, china, europe, Japan and the us. in practice, greg has produced housing, residential aged care complexes, school and taFe buildings and increasingly concentrated on pre-design (strategic resource plans, feasibility studies, functional briefs) for government, victoria police and taFes. he is currently working on a book on heuristic approaches to the design of contemporary chinese gardens. • it is relatively novel for its domain (‘I don’t think I’ve seen this before’); • it adds value to the total information content of the domain, it enriches or enlarges it (‘this adds to what we used to think’); and, • it, whether abstract, relational, or embodied in discursive, material or behavioural form, is suggestively fecund or provocative for others to build with and on (‘I can see what this might lead to’). Novelty is not enough on its own (though relative novelty seems always to be required). Creativity also necessitates surprise or unexpectedness— according to Lehrer (2009), encountering the unexpected is the quintessential step from which our brains learn. Indeed, creative propositions are those that do all three and, sometimes, result in paradigm shifts of thinking and production in the domain. hat is, creativity is the capacity to produce outcomes that are socio-culturally recognised as having these qualities, doing these things. Further, creativity as a capacity is not a state—it is misleading to say that matters, people or propositions are creative or not creative. Creativity varies in degrees. he outcomes of work, the proposition(s) that informed that work, and the individual or group that produced the work, may be said to be creative. how does creativity present itself in your discipline? Creativity is found in all aspects of the work of the intellectual domains of architecture and design; the discipline and the profession and their products. But, it is primarily and most readily acknowledged with design outcomes—buildings, urban areas, landscapes and other artefacts. It may be recognised in their forms, their materials and construction, and/or in the ideas, the thinking and working processes of their designers. Sometimes, though less frequently, creativity is acknowledged in supporting texts of two kinds: de facto manifestoes by lauded designers and more or less theoretical-historical works by others. he designers 103 how do we recognise creativity? through noting the presence of that triumvirate of qualities: relative novelty, domain enrichment and suggestiveness that is further productive for others. themselves are much more likely to be labelled creative than are those others—implying that usage of the term creativity requires produced, artefactual outcomes as a kind of base condition. However, in all cases, we recognise creativity, sometimes having looked for it. It does not ‘present’ itself. How do we recognise creativity? hrough noting the presence of that triumvirate of qualities: relative novelty, domain enrichment and suggestiveness that is further productive for others. What role does creativity play in design? I think that designing is inherently propositional, that designers ofer proposals for new futures and that only very rarely do they ‘solve’ problems (even if we sometimes still speak of ‘creative solutions’). hose futures would be new because they would difer from the futures that could otherwise be extrapolated from the status quo. he futures would result from continuing negotiations during designing between the present conditions selectively attended to, notions of futures desired and proposals being articulated. ‘Designers are driven not by their knowledge but by their curiosity’ (Steenbergen & Roh 2003: 16). Curiosity is inherently engaged with the novel and, once discovered or produced, the novel adds to a culture’s sum total of information. he curiosity of other designers drives further designing from that basis. Creativity is manifest in designers’ choice of what to address in a commissioned situation, what to pay attention to, what to be curious about in a task, circumstance, possible outcome or context, what material and thinking tools to bring to bear on the task as they negotiate and deine it with others, at what scale, degree of detail and depth to make a proposal, and in making cases for their proposals. What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? his is covered in my answer to the irst question and, if the question may be glossed as ‘how do we recognise creativity in the actions of others?’, then I address it in the next answer. 104 now, a caveat: novelty requires a minimum of unexpectedness but there is a fuzzy upper limit to comprehensible unexpectedness. However, at the risk of logical circularity, recognising creativity requires irst that we be intrigued; that a proposition, action or product holds our interest long enough for its creativity to be appreciated. Why are we intrigued? Perhaps because of that very creativity, and/or because of the proposition’s, action’s or product’s framing of its presentation, promotion or publicity. Or, because attention is drawn to its novelty, new information content or suggestiveness by its author(s) or others. And, the others with which we are most familiar are design students: we have all seen the fashions in formal propositions that sweep across design studios and wondered where they came from. Now, a caveat: novelty requires a minimum of unexpectedness but there is a fuzzy upper limit to comprehensible unexpectedness. And, within that range, what intrigues will be subject to vagaries of socio-cultural fashion, acceptability, taste cultures, attentiveness, education and other, often unconscious, negotiated determinants of that fuzzy boundary. can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Whether a proposition is relatively novel (or surprising or unexpected) can be assessed by knowledgeable/experienced assessors aided and abetted by databases of some sort. Usually, however, such databases are inexplicit and opaque because they are distributed across and within the minds of those assessors. Plus, there is an inherent logical problem, and I am mindful of 18th century Englishmen’s problems with black swans (e.g. Taleb 2008): to demonstrate relative unexpectedness is to demonstrate a negative (‘we have not met this before’). Useful questions can be asked to help us decide whether a proposition demonstrates enrichment of the information stock of the domain: • are more issues covered? • are more aspects of any one issue covered? • is the proposition deeper than relatively similar ones? • does it have cross-disciplinary implications? hese lend themselves to criterion-based assessment and the use of rubrics. 105 often assessors recognise opportunities that are not explicit in work. then the assessment issue is whether the student was aware of them. Whether a proposition is fecund for many others inherently seems to require retrospective assessment over time—entailing searches for ramiications, consequences and/or subsequent emulations. But, in design studio assessments, we can examine a proposition for whether principles are enunciated, multiplying pathways outlined or generative systems made clear that others could take up (thus exposing the design proposition’s ‘implicate fecundity’). Again, experienced assessors ought to be able to do this and rubrics could help. Often assessors recognise opportunities that are not explicit in work. hen the assessment issue is whether the student was aware of them. 106