ART 102 The Creativity Class

Lecture Hours: 2
Lab Hours: 2
Credits: 3

Introduces methods to improve creativity for college and career through concrete idea generation strategies that push previous experience, assumption, and current abilities. Stresses the importance of experimentation and risk taking, process, ways of thinking, environment, flirting with failure, collaboration, and the psychological components of creativity. Provides creative blocks and methods to maintain lifelong innovation.

Prerequisite: Placement into WR 115 (or higher), or completion of WR 090 (or higher) with a grade of C or better; or consent of instructor.
Student Learning Outcomes:

Learn and apply innovative problem solving techniques for use across various disciplines.
Recognize the psychology of creativity such as convergent, divergent and radial/radiant thinking and apply it to real world problem solving.
Analyze personal and group creative thinking processes and recognize the importance of collaboration to innovation.
Construct projects using the philosophical, psychological, emotional and concrete processes of creativity and discriminate between personal satisfaction and universal appeal.
Evaluate various genres which generate, rearrange, and juxtapose ideas and recognize the difference between novelty, redundancy, cliché and imitation.
Evaluate the inequity of creativity and how environment and culture encourages and discourages creativity.
Value the importance of fostering creative habits.

Content Outline

I. Definitions of Creativity
- Key contributors to creativity
  - Play
  - Collaboration
  - Risk-taking and use of mistakes
  - Environment
  - Interdisciplinary approach
- Innate inspiration and/or hard work and practice
- Blocks to creativity
- Identifying the obvious and seeing beyond it
  - Redundancy
  - Cliché
  - Imitation
  - Novelty
Psychology and Philosophy of Creativity
- Thinking processes
  - Divergent and convergent thinking
  - Radial thinking
  - Synthesis
  - Adaptive thinking
- Current and traditional theories of creative practice
- Inequity and Lack of Opportunity for Innovation
- Innovation as a privilege for the user and designer
- Economics of innovation
- Environment
- Culture
Strategies and Processes
- Seven stages of creativity
  - Pose a question for an idea or a problem
  - Research
  - Recognize the point of information overload
  - Gestation
  - List ideas
  - Execute idea(s)
  - Test and Critique
- Mind-mapping
- Quantity
- Environment
- Drawing from multiple disciplines/ideas from other ideas
- Journaling
- Experimentation: error, play, and collaboration
- Metaphor
- Use of chaos and juxtaposition
Fostering Individual Creativity
- Identify creative strengths and weaknesses
- Develop creative habits
  - Expect the unexpected
  - Be curious
  - Tolerate ambiguity
  - Talk about ideas with others
- Learn to value your ideas