Creativity

Creativity is a lot about novelty. If you solve a problem by usual techniques then it is about following a procedure and nothing else. If you use a technique that is different from all the existing techniques and solve it in a better way, then that is creativity.

By that token, all the previous techniques that existed before would have also been termed creative when that technique appeared. With the arrival of a newer technique, the old ones become relatively less creative. So something is creative until a better one replaces that and so on. Thus creativity is a moving target. As things evolve over time, be it a bicycle or a smart phone, creativity replaces itself by bettering the form and the function.

A child working with Lego blocks to build something is creative at that level. The child does not have a goal. Whatever is the outcome of the build, be it a truck or a house, it appears creative. An artist who brings out the image he saw onto the canvas is creative. But someone reproducing that is merely copying the same thing and hence it is not creative. A programmer who has a vision of how something should work and engineers a program to address that vision is creative. Someone who is merely solving a problem, reusing code by looking at a code snippet in Stack Overflow is not creative.

Anything original is creative. However, not all original ends up pleasing the consumer. For example, I can be a poet and write a poem about War and Peace. If the poem is not beautiful, then even though it is an original thought, it is not creative enough to appeal to the reader. Someone else can start on the same seed idea and can produce a more beautiful outcome with a lot more nuance and embellishment which can have great appeal. In this case, it will also appear very creative.

So creativity is a lot about the ‘How’ than ‘What’. How you do something to solve a ‘What’ is where creativity lies. The solution should be real and working for its user, be it art or engineering.