Creativity

What I read

In this paper, Guilford proposes a set of qualities of creativity that can be researched, and a set of ways to study these qualities.

To begin, Guilford defines creativity: that it “refers to the abilities that are most characteristic of creative people.” This is evidenced by traits, which can be studied and observed. He indicates that this field has been poorly studied, and cites the number of research studies in Psychological Abstracts referencing creativity—only 186 of 121,000 total studies included the word. One reason for this absence of research has been the assumption that creativity is the same as IQ; another has been because creative acts are rare. Another is because creative performance is not consistent, and so measurements of creativity would vary within a subject.

Next, Guilford indicates why creativity is valued in society; in addition to referencing specific disciplines or jobs, he also indicates that “we hear much these days about the remarkable new thinking machines…” and how these machines will change how we think and what we do. The presence of these machines would require a great deal of creativity to understand, manage, and coordinate.

Guilford then considers some existing and previous work that has provided theoretical views of creativity; a common one is that “all individuals possess to some degree all abilities… creative acts can therefore be expected, no matter how feeble or how infrequent, of almost all individuals.” This becomes a basis for investigating creativity empirically: it isn’t necessary to seek out a “genius”, because creativity can be studied in everyone. Another view is that of the entire personality, including intelligence, which is made up of thousands of traits. This can be approached through a “factorial conception of personality”, which means that any single test for a trait does not “intercorrelate perfectly.”

Next, Guilford offers his thoughts on the “general problem of the development of creativity.” He describes that we don’t necessarily know what creativity is or how to teach it, in a meaningful way, and that teaching it is the most critical role of researching it in the first place.

He focuses on factorial research as the primary mechanism for approaching this form of exploration. This includes selecting a domain for investigation, identifying hypotheses for each factor that is likely to appear in the domain, and constructing tests to measure differences in that factor. The test is then administered. Then, “Factors are extracted and their references axes are rotated into positions that are compelling because of the nature of the configuration of test vectors in the hyperspace. The psychological nature of each factor is surmised by virtue of the kinds of tests that have substantial variance attributable to that factor in contrast to tests which lack that variance.”

This is similar to a formal experiment, but “one important difference is the possibility of a statistical test of significance of the measured result for the experiment, but not for the factor analysis.” In a factor analysis, significance depends on the repeatable verification of a result. There’s no need for rigorous statistical analysis, as “We would hope to find the changes in factor loadings so marked that we would not feel seriously the lack of t tests or F tests.”

Next, Guilford identifies the specific hypotheses—factors that can be studied—that he believes are relevant to the nature of creativity; he qualifies that the ideas presented are specifically about scientists, technologists, and inventors. After each factor, he identifies several potential tests that could be implemented to explore that factor.

The first set of factors to consider is sensitivity to problems—that creative people may be more aware of when things may be wrong, and more curious about finding out why.

The next is fluency—the ability to produce many ideas, because “the person who is capable of producing a large number of ideas per unit of time, other things being equal, has a greater chance of having significant ideas.”

Next is novelty: the frequency of “uncommon, yet acceptable, responses to items.”

Flexibility is another potential set of factors of creativity; this is the ease with which someone “changes set.”

Synthesizing and Analyzing abilities are other potential factors of creativity that focus on organizing ideas into larger patterns. Similarly, Reorganization and Redefinition is a potential creative factor of transforming one thing into another, in terms of “design, function, or use.”

Managing complexity in a conceptual structure is the question of “how many interrelated ideas can the person manipulate at the same time”, which may be directly related to working through creativity.

Evaluation is the last potential set of factors, looking at how someone ranks or orders different ideas.

Guilford anticipates, and responds to the likely question, “How do you know your tests are valid?” First, he indicates that the factorial study of the tests is one kind of validation, as it will indicate which specific tests measure each factor, and how they measure it. He also indicates that, to show the relationship of the factors to creative productivity, it’s necessary to rationalize “correlation of factor measures with practical criteria.”

Guilford summarizes the work by reiterating how creativity can be viewed through a lens of factors; “creativity represents patterns of primary abilities, patterns which can vary with different spheres of creative activity.” Effort should be made in identifying the factors at play in creativity; once they accurately describe the domain of creativity, we can then identify people who have creative potential, and can better teach them to use their creative abilities.

What I learned and what I think

I selected this paper because it appears to be the source of the idea that creativity equates to novelty, which is then cited in nearly all of the articlesI’ve been reading on the topic. The idea has been giving me consternation because design as a process rarely has to do with generating novelty, and design as an output rarely is novel.

I learned that, first, Guilford has a pretty extensive description of creativity that includes a number of things fundamental to the field of design; next, the paper is not an attempt at a definition, but instead, a proposal for ways to identify factors that may lead to a definition; third, that Guilford’s scope of discussion is explicitly limited to science and technology; fourth, that his focus is on creativity as a set of characteristics about a person and not about an output or thing they make; and last, that novelty is one of nine areas of creativity that is in no way highlighted as most important.

The nine areas of creativity that Guilford offers include Sensitivity to problems, Flexibility of set, Ideational novelty, Synthesizing ability, Analyzing ability, Reorganizing or redefining ability, Span of ideational structure, and Evaluation ability. Some thoughts about how these relate to design (which is neither science nor technology, but may have some overlap):

Some designers are very aware of how broken the world is, on a detailed level. That’s Don Norman’s whole game, at least in context of usability engineering: there are problems everywhere, mostly caused by people with best intentions. Others are aware of problems at a scale of type kerning, or glitchy animation, or strange steps in a checkout process. I’m not sure this is what he means, or if it’sactually a defining characteristic of a designer. It’s a curiosity, for sure, and I want curious people on my team, but I don’t know if it has a real grounded immediacy in making things.

Flexibility is huge. During ideation, flexibility is the iteration and variation ability; it’s divergent thinking, holding multiple ideas in mind at once. And it’s integrated directly with synthesis and analysis, organizing, reorganizing, pattern finding and making, and sensemaking.

Something missing is craft and ability to actually conceive of an idea, and that feels like a pretty strong miss here. A creative person isn’t someone with great ideas!! – it’s someone with some of the qualities above, and others, that can actually produce something.

I’m not sure I entirely understand if Guilford is saying that these are facets of creative people, or that these are groups of facets of creative people, or that these might be facets of creative people that we should study and learn more about. And I’m also not entirely sure if Guilford is proposing the various tests he includes, or proposing that we test those tests, or just showing that those tests are examples of tests that might exist.And, I’mreally not sure I followed his thoughts on why any one of these tests would be valid, and how these tests are different than formal experiments.

But I am sure that somehow novelty was extracted from this more thorough description and discussion and positioned as one of just two facets that define creativity (as in Rusco’s The Standard Definition of Creativity), and that is not at all how this paper should be read. It doesn’t mean that Guilford is right and Rusco, and everyone else, is wrong, but if the field is going to base decades of creativity research on a foundation of Guilford, and is going to selectively misinterpret Guilford, there’s evidence of a problem. And, I wonder if many or any of the other facet explorations he proposes have actually been tested, and if not, why not?

Related, I think the design process that I’ve been studying for 25 years actually is at the heart of most of this paper, and I want to revisit things like Doblin’s view of design process as it relates, theoretically, to creativity. There’s something valuable there.