This article perpetuates a dichotomy that I have only just (at 50+) realised is false: creative versus technical. Technical people create: software and hardware often come out of nothing more than an idea.
The real dichotomy that this article is getting at might be effectively described as artistic versus non-artistic, but even that is not a complete description of the distinction. Maybe it comes down to the old left-brain/right-brain thing?
I used to call myself non-creative, until several good friends united to point out that I do create things, just not things that you could plausibly turn up in art galleries.
We need to reach a definition of creativity before we can have any discussion about whether an activity is creative or not.
A good definition I found somewhere is that creativity is the ability to create solutions for a problem, any kind of problem. A lot of creativity (if not all creativity) is the ability to assemble large objects from smaller ones, such as writing symphonies, designing a motorcycle engine, or building a computer program.
Creativity is the ability to create new things. It is the ability to hear 100 jokes and make a really funny new joke, or to bring a number of words and use them in a new manner to create a creative poem.
I find absolutely nothing inherently creative in a person's ability to follow musical notes and thus play the violin. The same goes for painting, and any number of other 'creative' professions. But to excel at these fields creativity seems to be necessary. Writing a novel without creativity will only produce a dull one that nobody wants to read, and the reviewers will say 'there is nothing new in it', because the author hasn't used creativity to produce new material.
Programming is one of the most creative professions, it is hard to think of a better example of a creative profession, because programming is problem solving, which is creativity.
Bad programmers either lack the skill and experience to build solutions, or are simply not creative enough to do it. A person's creativity is limited by their ability to hold complex problems in their brains, and different people seem to have different capacities of this brain 'RAM'.
After loading a complex problem into our heads, we then need skill to manipulate the objects to make something beautiful out of them, and this ability can be severely limited by the lack of knowledge of the field. It will be hard to create elegant mathematical solutions to programming problems without some knowledge of math.
My article actually intended to do the opposite - to argue that there is no dichotomy at all. I'm interested how you got the opposite impression. Maybe I should go back and edit some more. :)
I suffer from Artism as well :-) Which is to say as an engineer I solve problems with materials at hand in ways that meet constraints. That often requires creative thinking but the creative act is appreciated by other engineers more than lay people.
I think of it as the ability to see the unseen. A very non-crisp way of describing the ability to see a solution amongst a pile of symptoms or pain points. A sculptor sees the figure 'inside' the stone, an engineer sees the solution 'amongst' the available resources.
Now if I could reliably interview for it I'd be all set :-)
Really? I thought it was about building skills by just applying yourself. You don't learn guitar or Ruby in a night. You practice and play with them for years and integrate them into your projects.
I agree. If I made a robot that could follow musical notes and play the guitar perfectly, would anyone describe its playing the guitar as 'creative'? I hope not. This is a lab-like situation where we can know for sure that the robot is using zero creativity to play the guitar. It is just following instructions, it is not creating anything new.
However, if the robot could create new algorithms on the fly and could use them to tweak the way it played the guitar for the better, then we could say it is a creative robot.
Creative guitar players, like the second robot, invent new ways of playing a particular piece of music, or just a few seconds of it, to induce specific reactions in the listeners. This is creativity, and it seems to be rare not common, possibly because of how difficult it is to master the notes, and then to build rapport with the audience and manipulate their emotions.
Learning something is not a creative process, but finding better ways at doing it (after learning) makes you an artist. Same rule applies to learning following skills:
- Music
- A programming language
- Cooking
The real dichotomy that this article is getting at might be effectively described as artistic versus non-artistic, but even that is not a complete description of the distinction. Maybe it comes down to the old left-brain/right-brain thing?
I used to call myself non-creative, until several good friends united to point out that I do create things, just not things that you could plausibly turn up in art galleries.