Genealogy: Creativity in Our Lives

Everyone is creative, but some forms of creativity sometimes have more perceptual salience than others. For example, as in the definition below, people most often associate the concept with graphic art, music, fiction, poetry, and drama, and they make judgments about the level of creativity on a continuum (a range), rather than a dichotomy (creative/not creative). However, people engage in creative thinking in every field. Some people think that engineers are at the top of the list of creative thinkers because they often need to solve problems that require impressive forms of innovation (creativity). Even though the aforementioned fields require creativity, other fields do to. Life is full of problems to be solved, some small some enormous, and those problems often require creative thinking. Of course, sometimes we solve problems by applying some knowledge that we have learned, but sometimes the problems are new to us, so we need to use our “imagination or original ideas” to solve them. In this workshop, we will consider ways in which we have witnessed and experience creativity in our lives.