Creativity is a survival trait.
We all have it. It is something all of us exercise and can also get better at. It doesn’t always come in the shower or in a flash of lightning. Sometimes it requires kneading and cajoling, or desperation, or discipline, to unlock.
Relegating the concept of “creativity” to a department, or a set of Chosen Employees, is not only an injustice but an act of violence. It saddens me that I may not be considered creative because of the title of my function in an agency. It makes me even sadder to hear people outside of the “creative department” proudly proclaim that they are not “creative people.”
We industrialised idea conception. For this reason, some people are paid to conceive ideas, others to sell them, others to manage their production, others to decide which are good or bad, others to soothsay, others to punt insights to journalists. Some of us went to school to learn these skills; probably all of us learned with time to get better at whichever component of the process we were assigned to.
This assembly line approach to capturing the miracle of ingenuity cannot begin to describe what creativity is; it only describes commerce.
We should never mistake the economic exploitation of a thing with the thing itself.
We all have it. It is something all of us exercise and can also get better at. It doesn’t always come in the shower or in a flash of lightning. Sometimes it requires kneading and cajoling, or desperation, or discipline, to unlock.
Relegating the concept of “creativity” to a department, or a set of Chosen Employees, is not only an injustice but an act of violence. It saddens me that I may not be considered creative because of the title of my function in an agency. It makes me even sadder to hear people outside of the “creative department” proudly proclaim that they are not “creative people.”
We industrialised idea conception. For this reason, some people are paid to conceive ideas, others to sell them, others to manage their production, others to decide which are good or bad, others to soothsay, others to punt insights to journalists. Some of us went to school to learn these skills; probably all of us learned with time to get better at whichever component of the process we were assigned to.
This assembly line approach to capturing the miracle of ingenuity cannot begin to describe what creativity is; it only describes commerce.
We should never mistake the economic exploitation of a thing with the thing itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment