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Creativity

By Rui Penha*

Today we talk a lot about creativity: from creative industries to the DIY movements, including digital media and, of course, culture. The ability to think out of the box has quickly become a desirable feature in any situation, but soon it turned into a catchphrase on any curriculum vitae. There are, however, some myths regarding creativity. One of them is that all artists are, due to their training and activity, creative: in fact, many of them — including some of the most famous — have spent their entire lives pursuing an idea, in which they have naturally become proficient. But the myth I’m talking about is even more common: that creativity is a gift, a peculiar capacity that is mysteriously reserved to some of us.

We can confirm that simply by observing children playing: all of them, with no exception, are creative. Then why do some of us maintain this capacity active throughout our lives? Why is it that for some people creating seems to be a natural condition and to others it is a monumental task when at some point in our lives we were all creative? Observing children playing can give us some clues about environments that promote creativity: the ability to have fun without concrete objectives; the absence of fear of the ridicule; the free appropriation of references; the impatience to obtain results; the will to interact with and the availability to admire their peers prior to competing and judging. Because there isn’t much space here to expand my thought, I will focus on a feature that seems important from my observation of my children: the ability to give a name to an object and an intrinsically different function. And mainly their ability to suspend the disbelief that for a moment the sheets of paper on daddy’s book are not, in the materialistic world that adults call reality, lettuce that we can add to the Lego soup – excuse me, potato and carrot soup.

In his wonderful proposal for a general theory on human creativity applicable to the fields of humour, science and art [1], Arthur Koestler develops the idea that creativity consists of bisociating “two previously unrelated matrices of thought.” These “matrices of thought” are our abilities, the codes we master, the set of rules that govern the world where we move. The act of creation thus happens at the exact moment when we realise that something can be a pivotal element in the relationship between two matrices, the instant when a certain point we focused  reveals to us the intersection line between two planes. In Koestler’s words, creativity “is the perceiving of a situation or idea in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference.” This happens in humour (hahaha) — where matrices collide, resulting in laughter —, in science (a-ha!) — where one seeks to integrate the two matrices in a new synthesis — and in art (ahh) — the stage where matrices are juxtaposed and confronted. Going back to child play, it is easy to understand that make believe is a catalyser for bisociation: if we accept that a xylophone with a leash can be a dog, then of course this will be an animal with musical keys for ribs. What is an easy jump for a child is the epitome of creativity for an adult.

Oftentimes, ever since I recently started working at INESC TEC, I was confronted with the expectation that because of my area of expertise — music, and composition in particular — it must be easy for me to be creative, that it is confirmation that in fact I have a gift. For me this assumption is strange because it is clear that creativity is a process — or even better, an availability — that you work on, and even though it is hard, it does not require more than what is natural to us. Specialising in a certain area leads us to a deep knowledge of its most peculiar features, its norms and the boundaries we push until we’re given a little bit more ground, a little bit more knowledge. This familiarity makes the plane in which we navigate so fluid that sometimes it can be hard to bisociate with other plane, because it restrains the surprise that comes before the creative act. For that reason, it seems particularly important to me that INESC TEC has a wide range of areas under the same roof and a significant number of people from different nationalities: even someone with a PhD in music feels right at home! Therefore, in an environment with different methodologies many creative solutions may be lurking: searching for commonalities in different planes — and perhaps on different floors.

[1] Koestler, A. (1964). The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson.

*Researcher at INESC TEC’s Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (CTM)