defining and testing creativity

What do you think creativity is? How could you test a person's creativity?

Creativity is life, if you're not alive then you're not being creative.

But is everyone who's alive being creative?

*cracks fingers* This is exactly the sort of thing I spend too much time thinking about.

Quality: How consistently the creator avoids or does not avoid mistakes established in their medium.
Endurance: How long the creator can spend on a project (or a stage of a project) without quality suffering.
Flexibility: How varied the creator's projects are in terms of the differences applicable to the established medium. For example a novel would have word count, formatting, voice, genre, etc. A song would have instrumentation, structure, lyrics, emotion, and so on.

For all of these, one would have to establish a baseline for the specific creator. Quality would require a portfolio of some sort for comparison to future works. Endurance would be tested by having the creator start and finish a project in the least time possible (this is what deadlines are for), and then try for a long-term one. Flexibility would require the critic to be familiar with the medium.

edited 8th Dec '10 12:30:56 PM by Slan

But is everyone who's alive being creative?

Short answer, yes.

Long answer, still yes.

Creativity can be looked at as the mind's imagination exploring new places, new concepts and new ideas, and using these ideas in holistic and often surprizing fashions. The soul thrives on this.

^^ — And that I believe is a subjective measure of applied creativity. I think there is much more to it than these measures you've mentioned.

edited 9th Dec '10 12:38:47 AM by QQQQQ

Those are simply the factors I've noticed that are common to art forms in particular—if you have any others I've overlooked I'd be glad to see.

Why do you have flexibility as a prerequisite for creativity? I can imagine a person being very creative but only ever publishing one thing.

It's not a prerequisite, it's a measurable quantity. Such one-shot authors would therefore have little flexibility in terms of actual published works, but they could also be judged with a single piece.

edited 9th Dec '10 11:15:15 AM by Slan

And therefore less creative by your standard?

SEE PREVIOUS POST'S EDIT.

AND ALSO THIS ONE: I never said people lacking in one area would be less creative, this is more of an evaluation of individual strengths and weaknesses. They accomplish different things, but neither factor is inherently better than the other.

edited 9th Dec '10 11:20:04 AM by Slan

That doesn't answer my question. If you're gauging creativity in part by flexibility, does only putting out one work necessarily mean less creativity than someone of equal endurance and quality but higher flexibility?q

No. Again: Someone who puts out one book and accomplishes what they've set out to do would not necessarily be better or worse than someone who takes ten books to accomplish the same.

I still have no fucking idea how to judge the total sum of creativity.

We're not talking about a single media medium, we're talking creativity in general, which all human exhibit in some form or another, all humans are creative, period.

I see. Sorry for my confusion.

You're alright, it's a simple confusion, conundrum if you well, for the fair folk tropers out of times, a veritible testing point to all and with this trials once passed, a new age of dest-

-looks up-

woops sorry, nevermind.

so, how can we test creativity then, to move onto the second question, after all, everyone is creative, just in different forms, so what can we do to test this, or get a hypothesis about it!

I'm gfoing to have to say that, regardless of what you could, could not, wanteed to, or wanted not to publish, it is very hard for me to imagine a person who has only had one good idea, written one story, or drawn just one picture being very creative. Doesn't mean it's impossible, or that it's the only dimension upon which I'd measure it, but I do think it's a very meaningful measurement.

I remember reading about one experimental test which was asking a person

"Name the number of things you can do with a paper clip"

And if you could get 200+ things you could do with it, then you were considered highly creative einstein level genius. The funny thing with that test though is that kids in kindergarten would score super high (98% would be at 200+ things) and then retesting the same people every 5 years through the education system, they got consistently lower scores.