Attendees
Jason, Mingming, Emma, Nikhil, Josh, Harish, Alpha, Rohit, Aakash, Ashley, Irene, Sadhana, Medha, Ethan
Moderator
Context
Village Forecasting Club is a diverse community of people who are genuinely curious about understanding the world and the people around them better. We get together once a month in San Francisco for a moderated discussion on an important topic such as sustainability, health & wellbeing, and education. At last month’s dinner, we discussed culture. You can read the full write-up on our previous discussion here. Learn more about VFC here.
This month, we shifted our focus to creativity. Matthew B. Crawford, best-selling author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, describes creativity as “a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice.” Another view, perhaps more conventional, may be that creativity is catalyzed by lack of constraints and requires freedom of thought to transpire. We’ve all had creative moments throughout our lives – as children drawing on walls or as professionals discovering a novel way to approach a problem at work. On the surface, creativity seems to be a tool that we use to our advantage to progress. Some even rely on their own creativity as a skill that makes up the foundation for their careers. During VFC dinner #10, we discussed: What does creativity mean for you? Where is the line between creative and not-creative? How have your views on creativity been influenced by your profession? Read our full notes below 👇.
What does creativity mean for you?
Creativity is a cross-pollination of ideas.
The fundamental creative process is when you take something you know or learned in one area and apply it to new situations. Creativity is just building off of things we’ve seen or experienced (whether consciously or subconsciously) and leveraging knowledge in new contexts.
This idea is in line with the belief that creativity is fostered through process, repetition, and conscious action.
Creativity is the degree to which we are hallucinating.
One member who works in language models and machine learning expressed that although we view different systems as creative (i.e. DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc.), these models really haven’t seen anything yet. They are essentially hallucinating – taking a web of historical experiences and making association after association about those experiences to create something novel.
This view is similar to the cross-pollination view expressed by some members, but has a distinction in that there is no clear path to association between experiences that lead to a novel idea or creative expression.
Creativity in some fields is cross-pollination of ideas, but in areas that are purely creative areas like music or art, creativity is true originality.
Some members described movements in art or music that were completely different – almost heretic at times – from the norm of society. These expressions of art are so vastly different from what had been previously developed that there is no clear link between ideas (i.e. no way to prove cross-pollination).
How we define and evaluate creativity is extremely context-dependent.
One member described the story of cubic Japanese watermelons, a new form of watermelon that Japan created. When it comes to evaluating the creativity of this innovation, someone can look at creativity in multiple contexts. In regards to taste, the cubic watermelon and spherical watermelons taste exactly the same, and therefore maybe in that context the cubic watermelon isn’t creative. However, in the context of shipping and logistics, cubic watermelons have a significant difference compared to the spherical ones, as they can be transported much more efficiently. In that context, maybe the watermelons are creative.
The discussion around this view opened up the group’s conversation to another dimension: where do we draw the line in evaluating something as creative or not?
Where do we draw the line between creative and not-creative?
As long as someone thinks it’s creative, it’s creative.
Some people expressed this idea in different words – ”creativity is in the eye of the beholder”. From this perspective, anything that someone believes is creative.
One member of the group agreed with this, but went even further and stated that because anything can be seen as creative, nothing is actually creative. Therefore, creativity is actually an illusion.
If it’s a replica or copy of some thing or standard that already exists (i.e. in line with the norm), it’s not creative.
Basically, if it’s been done before in the same context, it’s not creative. It is technically creation, but is not creative.
The evaluation of creativity can only really be conducted by experts within a specific context.
For example, if someone is trying to evaluate how creative a piece of art is, that person may rely on other artists to explain why a certain piece of art is novel or not novel (using novel as a synonym for creativity in this case).
Some members pushed back on this and expressed concern with associating a value judgment on the level of creativity, because everything is contextual. One member pointed to “Jugaad Innovation,” a cultural ideal in India where people innovate to solve problems in extremely unique ways (i.e. they make do with what they have). In societies that don’t deal with resource constraints, maybe this type of innovation is not creative. However, in many cases where Jugaad is applied, there are significant constraints that make solutions truly novel.
Whether something is creative or not is directly tied to the outcome of that decision.
One member brought up the example of someone who trades stocks as their career – if they come up with a creative way to approach certain trades, and they make a significant amount of money doing so, it’s very clear to see that the trade was creative (if it wasn’t creative, it wouldn’t make money).
Some people felt that the outcome itself isn’t relevant. They felt that even in the stock trading example, as long as the trading strategy is new, even if it loses money, it’s still creative.
Everything people expressed thus far can be components of creativity and some combination of these factors is how something can be evaluated as creative vs. not creative.
Originality (novelty), applicability, value, replicability, and context are all components of creativity. Some make-up of each of these factors is how we can determine whether or not something is creative.
Maybe the best way to determine whether or not something is creative is to think about the least creative things we know and go from there.
For example, things that are extremely process oriented don’t appear to be very creative (i.e. going to the DMV, you likely won’t experience creativity).
This was the most controversial section of our discussion. There was really no consensus among the group – some people felt strongly that creativity is strictly tied to value generated. Others felt that creativity was so individualistic and subjective that someone cannot have a universal way to evaluate whether or not something is creative. Some tried to draw a bridge between the views expressed by developing an evaluation framework that consists of all of the factors that we discussed.
After we established that people had a wide range of views, we wanted to get to the bottom of where and how these views originated.
How do you feel like your views on creativity have been influenced by your profession?
Creativity is not the product in my profession, and that has made me think more openly about what creativity is.
Many members expressed views along this line. People shared personal experiences around how they have used creativity in their work to come up with novel ways to solve problems, from software challenges to hand surgery.
Some people reserved creativity primarily for art, but through work came to realize that they were able to leverage creativity deeply in non-art applications.
To be encouraged to use creativity in work is a privilege that only some people are afforded.
As we discussed our jobs, many members of VFC recognized that even though creativity may not be the product of their profession like it is for an artist or musician, many members have the privilege to be creative in how they approach challenges at work.
For example, highly regulated fields such as primary care medicine or even government jobs that are extremely process oriented do not enable creativity in the same way that a job such as software engineering would. Fundamentally, the risk of bad outcomes is higher in some cases than others when introducing creativity into the workflow.
Creativity in the context of work exposes a difference between creative outcomes and creative process.
The group discussed heavily whether or not people who work in highly process-oriented jobs are creative or not. Ultimately, the group arrived at a distinction between a creative process, and a creative outcome. Some people may have very structured processes that they must follow, but even within that process there could be room for creativity, while the goal of achieving the same outcome remains the same.
Throughout this part of discussion, it was clear that the group had consensus on the fact that different environments nurture (or discourage in some cases) creativity in many ways. Sometimes there is emphasis on creativity within the process, and sometimes there is value placed on the outcome instead of the process itself. Members pointed to several factors that have impacted their own creative process, such as risk tolerance, serious pressure (or the opposite: lack of pressure), mind enhancing drugs (such as mushrooms), meditation, and more.
Closing thoughts
In discussing topics like Creativity, it is important to keep in mind that these subjects are highly personal and are often intertwined with both positive and negative experiences that inform the views someone may have on the subject. Our goal in discussing Creativity was to broaden each of our own perspectives – without knowing how other people think about Creativity, we would be limited to the bounds of our minds (read: our creative limits!). By expanding the spectrum of views that we are aware of, we can approach our own lives with more thought and care. Whether you believe that creativity is a powerful tool or you believe that it is all an illusion, our hope is that our discussion helps provide you with more options by which to view, interpret, dissect, and ponder Creativity.
If this post sparked your curiosity at all, consider joining us for our next Village Forecasting Club dinner. Apply to Village here.