Thoughts on improving one's creativity.

Creativity is a topic that I’ve been interested in recently. What is creativity? How can one be creative?

Creativity is simply the process of coming up with a new solution to a known problem. A lot of the problems one encounters in life have so many solutions that it is possible to come up with one more. To be considered a creative solution, the idea should not only be novel but also represent a significant improvement over known ideas. The people who research this topic have pointed out that there are different types of creativity. Margaret Boden for example lists three.
1. Combinational creativity.
2. Exploratory creativity.
3. Transformational creativity.

Combinational creativity is taking two known ideas and combining them in a novel way to make a new one.

Exploratory creativity is just making changes to a known solution till you get a new one. Very often this might not result in dramatic improvements. But it is possible to imagine that one gets a significantly different solution after many improvements have been added to the existing solution. The creation of new species through evolution is an example.

Transformational creativity is a category of ideas that are just new and cannot be thought to have been derived from anything else that has existed before. These are the sort of ideas that make you think that they are “truly original”. These usually come about when one thinks about a problem in a way it has never been thought of before.

Can we now try to think of how one might go about finding new solutions? The combinational approach is the easiest to do. List down all attributes that you are looking for in your solution. Look at known solutions to the problem. There is a good chance that some of these solution do some of what you want. Find a set of known solutions which spans all your requirements. You now need to combine these solutions into a new one.

A second approach would be to do a set of what-if experiments. Try to change things in a way you think will take it towards filling up the missing requirements. Chances are you will stumble upon a way to solve your problem. You could also try to map your problem to a similar problem in a different domain and see how people have dealt with the new domain. You might find a solution that applies in that domain that does what you want. This thought process might give you clues about how you can solve the problem in your domain.

The brightest ideas come about when people take a problem and think about it in a totally new way. It is not clear to me if there is a set of axioms that people use in such an approach. It is usually possible for people who get such ideas to explain the new idea using known things. It is seen that such an explanation can be advanced only after the idea has been generated though. I find that such ideas have an air of obviousness to them. The obviousness is however only as a result of hindsight though. One can track the idea down to one or more of the fundamental assumptions about known solutions having been changed.

An approach to take would be list down all the fundamental assumptions that form the part of your approach to solving the problem. You could then try to think of ways to solve the problem with one or more of the assumptions removed or changed.

I find that engineers have a preference for the exploratory style. We like to make small changes to a known solution. Usually the benefits are small as well. Another small change is then identified and so on. I think such an approach is acceptable for “optimization” type problems where one is not looking for a dramatic improvement. I don’t see this way of working resulting in very major improvements. A preference for such an approach prevents engineers from reducing the problem to its basics to look for a fundamentally different solution. One needs to make a conscious attempt to restrict the time spent in such activities. They have a way of using up a lot of people’s time. I think it makes more sense to abandon this approach if the first few things you change don’t have the desired outcome. This way of solving the problem is very much like evolution. It takes a long time to make an impact. It would be useful to realize that there are other ways to be creative as well. That could motivate people to break the loop and think of other “ways” of being creative.

I’ll need to mention that no one invents anything following any of the approaches listed above. I’m of the opinion that these are just ways to prepare your mind. My personal experience suggests that I spend a lot of time thinking about a problem using these approaches. Then something happens and an idea is born. Chance, they say, favors the prepared mind. I’m only suggesting ways to prepare your mind.

Happy inventing. May the force be with you!