Back at the beginning of August, Gareth wrote a quick blog post about the term "creative", and how it applies to everyone, not just those in the art department. This is an idea I've wanted to expand on for a while now. As I've mentioned in previous posts, outside of Tangent hours, I work for myself as an artist and have just completed a Master of Fine Art degree. If I had a dollar for every time someone has said to me, "Oh, you must be so creative. I wish I was creative.", I wouldn't have to bother ever trying to sell any of the art I make. The thing is, as Gareth noted, you don't have to be creative to make art. The two things are mutually exclusive. There are plenty of artists out there who make completely lovely, serviceable pictures and objects completely devoid of any creativity. Being creative is not about making art, it's about utilising your skills to generate change. The word itself is, unsurprisingly, derived from the Latin creo, meaning "to make" …it's not about what you make, but how and why you make it.

Our UK offices recently invested some time rebranding to help bridge what appeared to be disparate aspects of the business. Moose brought us back the new Tangent Snowball brochure, and a quick read through reinforces our goals regarding creativity in the Melbourne office. The rebranding led to one obvious conclusion: that our business goals revolve entirely around creative thinking, insight and innovation. Everything else, from technology to design, is in the details.

To the Vector Belong the Spoils

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesise new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people." -Steve Jobs, Wired

One of the most common sayings that's thrown around when talking about creativity is "thinking outside the box". This is one thing that frustrates me no end, as it's just not possible. Nobody can drastically change their thinking to a completely different track: it's impossible to come up with ideas outside our own experience. What we can do, though, is make the box bigger. Like Steve Jobs said, creativity is about making connections between seemingly disparate thoughts, ideas or facts. When we have more experiences in our box, we can connect more things in different ways, and thus, become more knowledgeable. So being a painter doesn't qualify someone as creative: being intrinsically curious does.

One of my favourite animations of all time is The Dot and the Line, directed by Chuck Jones and based on the children's book by Norman Juster, author of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. The Dot and the Line follows our protagonist, The Line, as he tries to win the heart of the fickle Dot, who thinks The Line is boring and dull. Eventually, through perseverance and curiosity, The Line discovers the innumerable ways he can present himself, and he wins The Dot from the slothful Squiggle. Creativity is the vector victor.

A different line of thought

Strange as it may seem, there are those who don't want to believe that creativity is a skill you can build upon through hard work and determination. The old school belief was that creativity came from the nine Greek goddesses: Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (love poetry), Euterpe (song), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (hymns), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy) and Urania (astronomy). I've heard Elizabeth Gilbert talk about her relationship with the muse several times, on the wonderful podcast RadioLab and the equally fantastic series of TED talks. While the stories she tells and the way she delivers them are intriguing and fascinating, my notes for this post still include the sentence "Elizabeth Gilbert is angrymaking!" Gilbert is also the author of the ubiquitous Eat, Pray, Love, which I'm tempted to make a joke about, but I really can't as I haven't actually read it (and likely never will). Essentially, she is of the opinion that you're ideas are actually given to you by some kind of muse. They're not your ideas: you're just the conduit that realises them, and that taking credit for your own creative ideas leads to excessive narcissism. Which, of course, is a huge load of copout flavoured garbage. If our creative experiments fail, we should be able to recognise our mistakes, and if they don't, we should absolutely take ownership of our ideas without pretending they're 'on loan'.

In reality, hard work rewards itself: what may seem like an idea striking out of nowhere is actually the culmination of years of experience and knowledge. Of course, we are all inspired by the world around us and the actions of those in it, and any inspiration should be acknowledged. But inspiration is not magic. When you love what you do, it's impossible to switch off entirely. Whether we're conscious of it or not, the brain is always at work tossing about ideas and re-evaluating, trying to make connections.

Image courtesy of Karl Gunnarsson on Flickr, used under Creative Commons licence.