What Is Creativity?

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Definition of Creativity

According to my trusty Chambers dictionary, the definiton of creativity is "state or quality of being creative", which doesn't tell us much. The word "create" is defined as meaning, amongst other things:

"to bring into being or form out of nothing; to bring into being by force of imagination"

That's probably the way most people think of creativity - if they think about it at all. However I believe it's a little misleading.

In the real world we can never bring anything into existence out of nothing. A painter rearranges pigments on a canvas, a chef arranges and processes ingredients, a writer selects and arranges words from a language.

Of course, one can argue that those are simply the physical expressions of creativity. That brings us to a key point:

creativity takes place in the mind
Actually turning the creative idea into reality is more akin to a craft. Many people use the physical nature of their work to inspire their creativity, for instance the potter who feels the clay. Creativity is often an iterative process of continual experimentation and adjustment, but ultimately real creativity takes place in the mind. There are many people who are highly skilled at their craft but have little or no inspiration; there are many highly imaginative people who can mentally create wonders but lack the skill to implement them.

So creativity is fundamentally a mental process. Creativity is what happens in our minds when we innovate. That doesn't necessarily mean that it is an isolated process - Csikszentmihalyi's Systems Model of creativity stresss the importance of the external domain and field - but even then the ultimate act of innovation comes from within an individual human mind. The Gatekeepers simply determine whether or not the innovation will be accepted in the wider domain.

Innovation expresses itself in many forms. Sometimes it is in the conceptualisation of a work of art. Sometimes it is the realisation of the solution to a problem - the "Eureka" moment. At other times creativity can express itself in a brand new "invention" or "discovery".

Is Anything Really New?

But is anything ever truly invented from scratch? Just as physically we can only change and re-arrange existing matter, there is an argument that the same limitation applies mentally. Can we ever have truly original thoughts? Or do we simply re-arrange what is already in our mind to "create" something new?

If so then creativity becomes much less mysterious and we have the possibility of analysing the process. If we can pinpoint certain techniques we use without even realising it then we can potentially learn to increase our creativity.

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