What is Creativity?

6 Months ago I started working at a Product Design Consultancy in Boston as a Mechanical Engineer. For those of you that aren't familiar with the industry, a design consultancy is a company that develops products for other companies. There are 3 professions that tend to work at design consultancies. They are, (in oversimplified descriptions):

Design strategists/researchers: These are the people that interview consumers and do market research in order to find unfulfilled needs

Industrial Designers: These are the artists. The do conceptual sketches about what a product should look like. The general shape, colors, etc.

Mechanical Engineers: These are the ones who take the Industrial designers ideas and make sure they meet all the technical requirements such as feasibility and manufacturability.

All three of these groups work fairly closely together. Definitely close enough for each one to get a good idea about what it is the other does. This is where my insights on creativity come from.

For most of my life I looked at creativity the way most others look at it, as a characteristic held only by artists and other "artsy" people. I was always the one in school that was good at math, history, and other generic studies. I was absolutely horrible at any "art". Thus I looked at myself as being intelligent and not creative.

Then at work a few months back, I was getting my morning tea (Irish Breakfast... the best) and I got into a conversation with a colleague of mine in the Design Strategy department. We went back and forth on differences between engineers (stereotypically uncreative, formula-based robots) and their creative antithesis, industrial designers. Then he said something that really resonated with me:

Creativity is nothing but advanced analytics

Wow. Think about that for a moment...

The reason some of us look at creativity as a birthright to the gifted is that for some reason our society has linked "creativity" to "art", and "art" to pretty colors and shapes. Thus anything that isn't "artistic" isn't "creative". Which is absurd. Creativity is just the application of a breadth of knowledge to find solutions to problems. Thats all. Here are two examples of creativity; the standard view, and an alternative view.

Standard Problem: A painter wants to recreate a beautiful sunset.

Solution: The painter uses his knowledge of how to mix colors, use brushstrokes to create certain sensations to the viewer, and a memory of how a sunset looks. He then combines these skills in a fashion he is familiar to and creates a beautiful painting

Problem: An engineer wants to create a way to cool down his house.

Solution: The engineer uses his previous knowledge of convection, the relationship between heat and pressure of certain gasses, and electricty. He then combines these skills and voila! an air conditioner is created.
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Each one started out with a goal and used the tools they had in their theoretical toolbelt to accomplish it.

The takeaway from this is that creativity is the most effective way to solve problems. Do not dismiss it as a characteristic belonging solely to "those artsy guys". Whatever your profession, creativity can set you apart from the rest.

Next post I am going to tie in how I used creativity and my market philosophy together to develop my stock trading tool.

P.S.
Set to buy STEC @ 8.97 on monday, and sell at 9.87 or Tuesday's close, whichever comes first