Creativity researcher John Baer has warned us that although he’s spent several decades teaching creativity, he thinks “there’s no such thing as creativity.” Wait, what?
Of course there IS such a thing and I hope that’s why you’re here, and that you’ll keep reading. But Baer’s point is that it’s too difficult for us to teach, or to study, or even to identify some kind of general creativity. Instead, he argues, creativity is domain-specific. He writes, “one cannot use much of one’s knowledge of pre-Columbian pottery to solve a Rubik’s Cube, fix a bug in a computer program, or a write a haiku.”
So how does this idea influence SparkJuiceFlow workshops? SPARK workshops introduce the idea that creativity is not a talent reserved for a special few, but rather a set of skills that are teachable. These short workshops offer prompts to build your creative thinking skills. OK fine, but what about this domain-specific constraint? How do we teach creativity in a way that is Baer-aware? That’s where JUICE workshops shine. The three-hour JUICE format starts with prompts that develop creative thinking, and then helps you adapt them to your individual pursuits.
Divergent thinking, remote associations, and openness to experience are commonly understood to enhance creativity. But what does “divergent thinking” mean for glassblowers? How do “remote associations” work in the context of engineering? How does “openness to experience” help art-science interdisciplinary collaborators work together more effectively?
I welcome your novel ideas about how you adapt creative thinking skills to YOUR work.
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