On Creativity

[holland]

Creativity is the act of combining unlike things to imagine something new. It is an existential skill that our subconscious mind is constantly engaging in through background visualizations to help solve the problems we come across in our day-to-day-life and to make sense of the surrounding world. Its strongest engagement with this is during deep sleep. Our conscious mind also engages in creativity for personal amusement or to create new things to share with others.

You would think that as we age, we'd become more creative, because we learn more about the world and thus have more things we can combine together. But with this increased amount of options comes a higher chance of analysis paralysis and high cognitive load when we do try to create thanks to the paradox of choice. And we also spot many more patterns over time, which we're likely to lean on in a subconscious effort to reduce that cognitive load when creating, resulting in things like tropes; the things we combine turn out to not be all that different from one another. We're more likely to imagine things that are predictable to other adults.

Whereas for children, the options available to them are so limited that they can't help but combine things that don't make much sense to combine, like the color blue and the animal giraffe. And because their options are so limited, the combinations they see from other children are also seen as predictable and logical, despite seeming incredibly strange and unique to the adults around them. So our perception also plays a big role in influencing what counts as "different" for the purpose of quantifying something's creativity.

In that way, creativity is not really an objective measurement. It depends on the audience you are targeting as to how fresh and unique something will feel.

To get back the "natural" creativity we had as children -- to remove the cognitive load and analysis paralysis of imagining new things as an adult -- we can use tools like creative constraints, which are artificial constraints we put on the options available to us when creating.

When we solidify our creative choices into something canon to a project, as opposed to vagueries floating around in our imagination, we enter the realm of design.