Graphic Design and Branding VCD214 Creative Strategies: Meaning of Creative Strategies

Creative Strategies

• Creativity is a complex and mysterious concept, difficult to define due to its ambiguity and lack of a universally accepted definition.
• Early definitions of creativity include:
  • Guilford's definition: "the abilities that are most characteristic of creative people"
  • Definition: "the production of novel, appropriate ideas in any realm of human activity"
  • Dewett's definition: "the production of novel and useful ideas, processes, or products by a person or group"
• Creativity is commonly regarded as the production of novel and useful ideas or problem solutions.
• Creativity includes two dimensions:
  • Novelty notion: a phenomenon in everyday life, accessible to anyone
  • Usefulness notion: material or practical methods of assessing the usefulness of novel ideas

Creativity Concept

• Creativity can be seen as a mental process that produces novel and useful concepts or ideas.
• It can be divided into three types:
  • Creating something new
  • Combining things together
  • Improving or changing things

The Psychological Basis of Creativity

• There are three Ps approach in psychological research on creativity:
  • Ps 1: Novel products such as objects, machines, works of art, ideas, solutions to problems, industrial or production processes
  • Ps 2: Psychological processes such as fantasizing, diverging from the customary, or inventing
  • Ps 3: Personal properties of the person that permit or promote the production of novelty, including openness for the new, and self-concept as innovator

Creativity Theories

• Objectives of Wallas's model:
  • Process: understanding the nature of the mental mechanisms that occur when a person is engaged in creative thinking or creative activity
  • Theories that focus on the creative process aim to understand the structure and nature of the creative process in terms of stages, which can be sequential or recursive, or underlying componential cognitive processes

Wallas's Model

• The creative process consists of four stages:
  • Preparation: gathering information and defining a problem
  • Incubation: taking time away from a problem, at least consciously
  • Insight (illumination): a solution or idea suddenly makes itself known
  • Verification: testing the idea or applying the solution

Guilford's SOI Model

• Divergent thinking: occurs when ideas and associations move in varied directions, resulting in new and original ideas
• Convergent thinking: occurs when cognition is used to identify one correct or conventional answer
• SOI stands for "Structure of Intellect" and comprises up to 150 different intellectual abilities organized along three dimensions:
  • Operations: six operations or general intellectual processes (Cognition, Memory recording, Memory retention, Divergent production, Convergent production, and Evaluation)
  • Content: five broad areas of information (Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Symbolic, and Semantic)
  • Products: six products, in increasing complexity (Units, Classes, Relations, Systems, Transformations, and Implications)