Complete thesis - Murdoch University

• preliminary assumptions and observations – for example◦ talent, education and cognitive skills do not appear sufficient for high levels ofcreativity, nor are particular clusters of personality traits◦ a great many outstanding creative individuals have described the phenomenonof ‘incubation’: after ceasing to consciously work on a difficult problem, theysometimes experience an apparent flash of illumination, during which the solutionappears to them unexpectedly• three components:◦ domain relevant skills – the more skills the better, and the ability to imagine/playout situations◦ creativity-relevant processes – including breaking perceptual (the way you perceivea situation) and cognitive (the way you analyse) set and breaking out ofperformance ‘scripts’, suspending judgement, knowledge of heuristics (eg use ofanalogies, when all else fails try something counter-intuitive, make the familiarstrange), adopting a creativity inducing work style (eg tolerance for ambiguity,high degree of autonomy, independence of judgement)◦ task motivation – intrinsic motivation is the most important component.More recent work has turned to social and environmental factors that influence creativity.Newer definitions describe creativity as the confluence of cognitive processes, knowledge,thinking-style, personality, motivation and environment over the life span (Adams-Price,1998; Sasser-Coen, 1993).From their summary of empirical studies of the creative process, Edmonds and Candy (2002)distill the following key activities for creativity in problem solving:exploration of ideas, knowledge, and options, based on• breaking with conventional expectations, whether visual, structural, or conceptual,is a key characteristic of creative thought• immersion – the complexity of the creative process is served well by total immersionin the activity• holistic view – the full scope of a design problem is only fully embraced by takinga holistic, or systems, view. The designer needs to be able to take an overviewposition at any point and, in particular, to find multiple viewpoints of the data oremerging design important122