Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity - The creative spirit

Critical Analysis

There is a gap between taking a risk and succeeding, and a variety of obstacles disrupt crossing that gap. These may come in the form of individual obstacles of skill or confidence, and in externalities, such as other people who are impacted by or observing the attempt.

In the studio, an expected obstacle in the way of creativity is a lack of skill and ability to execute. Students are in school to learn craft, such as how to draw or how to manipulate material effectively. The effectiveness in design is based on bringing an idea to life during the process of designing, so that the autotelic process can continue. A student makes something, and in real-time responds to what they made and makes something else. Although it is a generous use of the language of risk-taking, placing a mark on a paper is to make a small move towards a goal, and the small move may “fail” in provoking the next move (either at all, or as intended). Often, it is the student’s self-consciousness of each move that limits the next; the process is slow, with too much overt reflection offering too much time for the construction of obstacles.

Counterintuitively, it is the student that is constructing the blockers themselves, simply by working through the process they are learning. In some ways, the risk that is being taken is a risk that they will establish too many of their own blockers, and be unable to work through them: the risk is one of self. Introspection may be what bubbles that risk to the surface—reflecting on what they have made (looking at it, for example) may show the student the blockers that they themselves have established, which may make the risk feel amplified.

Critique is a process through which those blockers are frozen in time, shown, and often, “zoomed out” to a level of idea. Critique in studio sometimes evaluates execution, but is also focused on the intellectual value of the output as a whole. The gap between risk and reward, and the risk itself, has changed. The risk is in social judgement, and the stakes may be a grade, or social standing, or negative self-sentiment. Critique often depends on substantiation and justification to move through the obstacles that the authors offer as inevitable: “You can’t defy the crowd and then expect it to ignore you.” Risk-taking becomes intertwined with rule-breaking during critique—it is showing a completed risk and waiting for the reward to be awarded. The stakes are social acceptance, and the authors indicate that rather than ignoring an attempt, “more likely [the crowd] will try to get you to join it. And if you don’t, the crowd is likely to throw up an obstacle course in your way.” (287)

One of the reasons critique is argued to be valuable is that it provokes the perseverance necessary to overcome these obstacles. This perseverance often reverts to a defensive and rhetorical stance—in its best light, a “courage of one’s convictions” (287)—where making more things is argued to be a better approach, and the designer “must be willing to take risks and to go beyond his or her first creative ideas and generate others.”

Strenberg and Lubart offer ten “basic steps creative people take” that lead to creative performance, and all of them emphasize creativity and creative-risk at an idea-generation level or at a social level. What is missing in their argument is a discussion of creativity at a level of action. They offer “creativity in the small” (287) as a place of having “new or possibly even useful ideas, but they are ideas at the level of details.” But the authors emphasize the ideas and not the process towards the ideas, as “much of life is about little things.” For design educators, the ideas are somewhat unimportant, because they are teaching both to have ideas and to communicate them. This typically comes through form-giving, and sketching is a focused and somewhat myopic process where attention can’t help but be aimed at details. It is making and seeing those details that is being trained: at early stages in art and design education, a student is learning to connect their hand with their head (or, perhaps a better way of saying this is to disconnect the two, so that one can flow without the other intruding).

The stakes of these risks are more immediate and constant, and are likely not coached-through or mentored-through during a group critique. The type of guidance necessary must happen at the actual time the risk is occurring: students need support literally while they are making something. If design education is to be considered a risky endeavor, the student shouldn’t take the risk on their own. They need more than just encouragement or an environment of trust. They need a partner who is more skilled than they are to model the activity as they practice it. The stakes need to become lowered, and the action needs to be guided.

All of this is to say: there is a level of risk-taking (hyperbole that may not be necessary) that is happening in real-time, that is ignored by discussions of novelty, critique, ideas, and even introspection. The risk is one of “pen to paper” and the fear of, and actual production of, poor work product. The output itself is the blocker, and the student is the one who enacts the blocker. Modeling may be a form of transferring the risk to the professor, who takes it on behalf of the student in a way that is made extremely obvious and overt.