Can creativity be taught? [Forbes]
All posts tagged creativity
Kirby Ferguson is an independent filmmaker who has both a gift for rapid fire verbal delivery as well as the editing chops, and amazing erudition, to back it up. His Everything Is a Remix series of shorts are perfect for demonstrating quickly how culture works: he does a nice job of demonstrating how cultural products are influenced by previous products. His focus is largely on films, but other genres get swept into the mix as well.
And here’s his most recent piece as of this post:
I am a college professor, and, so, far be it for me to deplore the college degree as the mark of civilization and/or individual accomplishment. That would be like Ford saying cars aren’t necessary for everyone. And yet, I worry when we establish these kinds of bench marks if we aren’t forgetting that the bench getting marked wasn’t that of the master craftsman who almost never had/has a college degree.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a terrific interactive website up that allows you not only to zoom in and out on parts of the U.S.A. but also break populations down by gender and “race.” I used the site to generate the following map (but we cold also call it a visualization or, more popularly, an infographic):
I decided to zoom the map to the part of the world in which I live and work … and study. As you can see, Lafayette parish (parish = county), the somewhat triangular blue shape in the middle of the map, is the only parish in southwest Louisiana to be average. (It is above average for Asian Americans with degrees, and, sadly, below average for African Americans.) Lafayette is an island surrounded by a sea of under average parishes. Does that mean that intellectual capacity and/or engagement are under average? Clearly, my own research argues that this is not the case. In fact, of the boat makers and engine designers profiled in Genius Loci, only one has a college degree, and yet these are men responsible for the creation of industries and market capitalization in the millions of dollars. They have also created jobs on an unprecedented scale.
So, yes, tracking college degrees is important, but it is not as important, nor is it a good index, of intelligence and creativity.
Nice interview with Francis Ford Coppola in The 99 Percent on his three rules “1) Write and direct original screenplays, 2) make them with the most modern technology available, and 3) self-finance them” and much more. Along the way he laments that cinema was so quickly commercialized and he makes this very interesting comment about the future of content creation:
We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script. This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money? In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.
I just finished a long post to the digital humanities seminar about free writing, which they will be doing, and the internet. I mentioned Mark Levy’s Accidental Genius, from which I will be drawing for some of our free writing techniques, and my quick search to turn up a link both to the book and to his website, turned up this wonderful article from Wired, entitled “Accidental Genius” which recounts how the law of unintended consequences has worked out for several inventions:
- Gunpowder was meant to prolong life (as a pill).
- The mechanical clock’s intended use was to regulate monastic prayer.
- Edison developed the phonograph to record telephone calls.
- Viagra was developed to help with angina.
One of the awesome — in the original sense of awe — things about the web, and about blogs in particular, that is both like and unlike, say, the experience of literature, is coming across someone with sensibilities akin to your own. You get a sense of affinity sometimes with literature, especially in the realm of autobiography, but it’s a drawing toward. The thrill I sometimes get when I read someone in the middle of a project, in the middle of thinking, is drawing alongside them. We are peers in the sense that they write and I read and, in some cases, I write and they read. It’s not yet a thrill I have encountered in my scholarship, but perhaps I will one day.1
This drawing alongside (a bit of Heidegger there in keeping with my newfound desire to return to my intellectual roots) is thrilling in the sense that one finds oneself in the company of like-minded others. More importantly, it is often the case that these writers are themselves struggling to articulate something themselves. Thus, there is a kind of drawing together in not yet knowing what one wants to draw.
Such is the case for me and the Coudal Partners in general: they have realized my own love for notebooks in an actual, ongoing commercial enterprise, by creating the Field Notes line of notebooks:
Field Notes - Photo by AndarsKI, on Flickr
No, I don’t use them myself — I prefer a slightly larger notebook, as I have discussed elsewhere, but hey, CP, we can talk about it! — but all the trouble they’ve gone to get them right, and the fact that they are now in the offset printing business is something I find totally amazing.
What prompted this post, however, is eeriness of their current project, a film with the working title of Seventy-Two Degrees. The idea, and driving force, behind the film is this photograph:
The Picture
When I showed it to my wife and described how “the picture” had become an obsession that transformed itself into a film project for the Coudal Partners, she laughed out loud, recognizing my own fondness for that particular era and that particular aesthetic. I have, in general, always been fond on high modernism, especially its European inflections and in some of the American manifestations of the fifties and sixties. I am also quite taken with the allure that technology held in that era. Before encountering this post, I had begun to re-read some old Alistair MacLean novels, having watched Three Days of the Condor while at UCLA for the NEH seminar:
A Still from 'Three Days of the Condor'
The folks at Coudal go one better in their research and turned up this great gem from the fifties: “On Guard! The Story of SAGE” by IBM Corporation, Military Products Division. (Really, you need to watch it — and thank you, Internet Archive.)
Where this takes me next … well, I have a few ideas.
For one, now that I am beginning to enjoy writing the boat book — I mean, actually looking forward to producing prose — I find myself thinking about what I would like to write next. Sure, some more work in this area might be possible: I’ve begun a dialogue with the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology and BOEMRE to extend my research on fabrication shops into larger shops that service the offshore industry. And I am also thinking about thinking about the nature of the creative dynamic within the Cajun and Creole music scenes in Louisiana. But I also find myself thinking about fiction writing.
More on that some other time.
-
I would even, I think, change the subject and scope of my scholarship were I to find a partner, let alone a larger collaboration, with whom to work. Granted, the only way others will be able to find me is if I publish more. But I am not entirely sure that the pieces I have coming out in the next few years really represent what all I am interested in. Scholarship is such that we break off very small pieces these days. (Again, if I make this assertion it is up to me to find a way out of it.) ↩
Signal vs. Noise, the weblog of 37signals, has a terrific post up about Steve Jobs meeting Edwin Land. What I find especially interesting is the account of Land’s sense of “discovery” over “innovation” or “creativity” — see how I put all those words in quotation marks there? They rattle around so much these days they almost feel more like baggage than useful tools for thinking. Anyway, Land is reported to have remarked: “I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.” The post has a brief bio of Land that reveals someone who just wouldn’t quit — he worked on one of his earliest inventions by regularly using a lab at Columbia University which he accessed by climbing in through an unlocked window.
This flashback at Lapham’s Quarterly makes me realize two things: writers often don’t have much to say about writing and I will never understand how people can get anything out of presentations that really don’t say anything. Is it just the brand name? Really? Vonnegut says it and somehow it’s profound?
But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.
I only tweet occasionally. Not as many people follow me on Twitter as read this blog. I’m okay with that. And, for the record, I only check my Facebook page once every two weeks. I am completely not okay with the fact that Facebook not only makes it impossible for me to get back out anything I put in, but that they are using whatever I put in to sell me stuff. Others are okay with that, but the promise of the web, to me, was that it would not only be a read-write experience but that we would own our own writing. Facebook is easy and convenient, but it’s not democratic.
But back to Twitter. There’s a guy who tweets things his dad says. Apparently he got a deal to write a pilot for television. (I’m not making that up: you’ll have to look it up on TechCrunch, though — I already closed the page.) This is kind of cool. It means people can experiment with content and it might just end up paying the bills. For the record, his dad, be he fictional or real, says mostly expletive-laden things that occasionally make you smile. Only one made me laugh out loud:
“No, I’m not a pessimist. At some point the world shits on everybody. Pretending it ain’t shit makes you an idiot, not an optimist.”
While I am writing about new forms of creativity, I would also like to point out this terrific profile of UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor David Cope. Cope was the inventor of Emmy, Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI, or “Emmy”), which was well received by some but made others uncomfortable with the questions it raised about human creativity — the short answer for me is that all the formulas Cope entered into Emmy were clearly based on work done by humans, but I don’t know entirely how Emmy works. Cope is about to release a successor to Emmy, known as Emily Howell. Two compositions by Emily are included in the article. They make for an interesting listen.
While I was still reeling from the idea of content farms, I was heartened to come across another neologism that I didn’t know about but, in fact, was heartened to learn: layer tennis. Layer tennis occurs when two graphic artists square off in Photoshop battle to see who can trump the other in a series of transformations of a design initiated by one of them but finished by the other designer. Luckily, for me, my introduction to layer tennis came in the form of a delightful narration of a recent match between Nicholas Felton and Khoi Vinh. Vinh recaptures the heat of the moment well.
As I noted previously in observing Chris Anderson’s recent cover article for Wired magazine, the garage as shop is on the rise:
We wanted to keep that garage-atmosphere of creativity that we cherished as students. School is one of only places where one can freely experiment, discover and even fail with little consequence. When you’re out in the real world, you have to make a living and it becomes that much harder to work on projects that are truly meaningful to you. In an academic environment full of creative freedom, students are often able to experiment to their hearts’ content. Because of that, you see games that are being crafted from the heart and for a desire to push boundaries as opposed to what a marketing venn-diagram dictates. It offers a chance to play with other things besides Robots and Ninjas. Publishers are jumping at this opportunity for new IP. I think this is a trend that will only continue. (Paul Bellezza, cofounder of developer The Odd Gentleman, talking to Andrew Webster of Ars Technica. Link).
I am delighted, and fascinated, by the emergence in the last few years of interest in the mechanical arts, for lack of a better description. Mechanics, machinists, and metal workers of various kinds (welders and fabricators among many others) suddenly find themselves in the spotlight. While only a few people are familiar with Douglas Harper’s classic study of a one-man agricultural equipment repair and fabrication shop, Local Knowledge, most will have seen Richard Sennett’s somewhat overly-romanticized The Craftsman as well as Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft.
These books are, of course, joined by shows like the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs and the Travel Channels Made in America (which is no longer in production). If you throw into the bargain the assembly-line porn that is Science Channel’s How It’s Made, which regularly re-runs on the History Channel I believe, and the Food Network’s Unwrapped, then what seems to have been revealed is huge thirst in America for, as our president put it in his inaugural address, “the makers of things.”
And, it seems, those makers seems to be folks with dirt underneath their fingernails.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in their discussion of “the new industrial revolution” that Wired chose for their cover the image of a wrench turning a nut … powered by a greasy hand, which is exposed to the world by the presence of a rolled-up shirt sleeve.
One of the dominant figures for “let’s get to work” is rolling up one’s sleeve. The arm and the hand go away, but the wrench remains in this Shell ad for “ideas into action”:
The abstracted wrench here transforms into a pencil, both emphasizing the “work of creativity,” of idea generation, and also the necessity of finding “ideas that work.”1
There is also, I would argue, a subtle reinforcing of the leveling of the playing field between hand-work and idea-work. In fact, a recent article in the Harvard Business Review makes precisely that argument. In “Restoring American Competitiveness”, Gary Pisano and Willy Shih argue that the rush to commoditize manufacturing — resulting in outsourcing — of contemporary corporations has resulted in a breaking of the link between the folks in research and development on the one hand and the folks on the shop floor actually making the products.2 What is lost is the productive conversation, the feedback loop, between those two groups, and that means ideas are lost. There suggestion is that the U.S. must encourage the rebuilding of an “industrial commons.” (Here’s a link to the article but be forewarned that it’s only to a summary page and that the download requires payment.)
-
My thanks to my colleague Mary Ann Wilson for loaning me her copy of The Atlantic. She noted: “The wrench poster reminds me of the WWII poster, WE Can Do It, of the working woman with her sleeves rolled up, and nothing but muscle — and brain — power suggested.” The Shell advertisement appears on page 45 of the February 2010 issue. ↩
-
Interestingly, it’s been Harvard itself, and HBR, which have led the attack on the MBA as the source of business problems and not the solution. Pisano and Shih argue that it’s MBAs who have led the charge to see manufacturing as a “low value” endeavor deserving outsourcing. Crawford’s argument is much the same, but he goes further to note that, in the end, many blue-collar jobs will be safe precisely because they must be local — your car mechanic, plumber, electrician — while many white collar jobs will eventually be outsourced, e.g. radiological analyses now being done in the Philippines. ↩
I have never heard of “cultural and activity research” until a CFP (call for papers) came across the Digital Humanities mailing list. But here’s a CFP for the Nordic Conference on Activity Theory and the Forth Finnish Conference on Cultural and Activity Researc which describes itself as:
The conference is dedicated to examining human creative activities. The conference theme is “Perspectives on social creativity, designing and activity”. We conceive of design as a field of knowledge and activity concerned with the creation of artifacts. Creative activities operate with diverse modes of knowing and representations. Creativity is a social quality that involves communication and community formation. Creative activities and design are needed when humans transform their circumstances by developing new technologies and institutions. Creation of the new relies on cultural mediation and historically accumulated resources. Activity theory and socio-cultural approaches offer fresh perspectives on these themes. The conference aims at bringing together diverse points of view and disciplinary orientations to discuss social creativity, design and activity.
It looks great, but the conference comes at the end of this academic year, which is also close to the end of the university’s fiscal year. And, as many know, there just isn’t that much money to begin with. Let along enough to help subsidize a flight to Helsinki and a $350 (200€) registration fee.
Sigh. It looks amazing.
Fake Steve Jobs is a bit off my usual path, but thanks to one of those odd trails of links, I ended up at Dan Lyons’ ventriloquist act. FSJ is good for poking fun at Steve, but he is also good at poking fun at the larger tech industry. In his most recent post, he does an amazing job of not only pillorying AT&T for complaining about, of all things, pesky users who actually want to use their phones for crazy things like making phone calls and the 3G network for wacky things like moving data around, but also of pillorying corporate America in general which really does seem to have fallen into something of a malaise in the MBA era. (The re-thinking of the MBA by no less than its home, the Harvard Business School, is something for another time.)
Here’s the best two paragraphs from his pretend dialogue with AT&T:
While I’m ranting, let me ask you something, Randall. At the risk of sounding like Glenn Beck Jr. — what the fuck has gone wrong with our country? Used to be, we were innovators. We were leaders. We were builders. We were engineers. We were the best and brightest. We were the kind of guys who, if they were running the biggest mobile network in the U.S., would say it’s not enough to be the biggest, we also want to be the best, and once they got to be the best, they’d say, How can we get even better? What can we do to be the best in the whole fucking world? What can we do that would blow people’s fucking minds? They wouldn’t have sat around wondering about ways to fuck over people who loved their product. But then something happened. Guys like you took over the phone company and all you cared about was milking profit and paying off assholes in Congress to fuck over anyone who came along with a better idea, because even though it might be great for consumers it would mean you and your lazy pals would have to get off your asses and start working again in order to keep up.
And not just you. Look at Big Three automakers. Same deal. Lazy, fat, slow, stupid, from the top to the bottom — everyone focused on just getting what they can in the short run and who cares what kind of piece of shit product we’re putting out. Then somehow along the way the evil motherfuckers on Wall Street got involved and became everyone’s enabler, devoting all their energy and brainpower to breaking things up and parceling them out and selling them off in pieces and then putting them back together again, and it was all about taking all this great shit that our predecessors had built and “unlocking value” which really meant finding ways to leech out whatever bit of money they could get in the short run and let the future be damned. It was all just one big swindle, and the only kind of engineering that matters anymore is financial engineering.
Tell it, Fake Steve Jobs. Tell it.
