tdaxp makes a good start, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Perople have been thinking about creativity for a very long time. Thinking hard about it started some time in the 50s [?] with people in the advertising industry. [See also Fritz Zwicky on morphology.] Bookshelves have been written about it. Schools teach it (even though some maintain it can’t be taught – it’s like being able to play the violin – either you can or you can’t). I believe everybody can be taught to improve on the creative ability they have.

Indeed, books have been written on creativity for a long time. The scientific study of creativity began with Guilford’s (1950), which was actually presented in 1949. Whether the psychometric properties of creativity, creative production certainly can be improved with training.

Guilford, J.P. (1950) Creativity, American Psychologist, vol5, pp444-454.

They’re certainly creative. Like that MSNBC woman who had video of a black guy edited to hide his race and fit her prefab racist narrative about angry white men. I’d like to think I’m pretty creative but I wouldn’t have thought of that.

But if they seek job stability, in journalism? Here’s a google search of a href=”http://news.google.com/news/search?um=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=journalist+layoff”>”journalist” and “layoff”. You get slightly different variations with the plurals.

Very first hit when I ran it: Washington Post profiles a “journalist” who’s so creative that after being whacked, she’s burning through her savings pretending to her friends she’s still employed in that notoriously high-prestige (snort!) high-income (snort again!) field. She’s a TV journo who can’t find another gig. Hot tip, honey: TV “journalists” are hired for looks, not skillz. At 39 you are past your sell-by date. You sure chose yourself some “stability.” What did you ever think you’d do when you started to wrinkle? Time to show some of that vaunted creativity and seek the entry-level clerical job J-school prepares you for.

Next hit: The inevitable “Journalism collapses, minorities hardest hit” evergreen, in this case from the Boston Globe, which Pinch Sulzberger will sell you for one cat’s-eye marble and a case of beer. And you can owe him the beer. It turns out that layoffs are a threat to newsroom diversity. It’s very important that there be a proper balance of black, asian, hispanic, native American and inuit/aleut liberal Democrats in the newsroom. (Note. I read the google cache of the page — the actual Boston Globe page gives a malware alert. Maybe that’s how they’re creatively planning to pay for all those Underperformers of Colour?)

Creativity in journalism: as in, “make stories up”? Work out ways to slant facts to the accepted party viewpoint?

If they’re talking about writing – putting ideas into words, sentences, paragraphs, articles – why is it that writing, both fiction and non-fiction, is dominated by men? (The good writers who are women are as good or better than the men, but it’s still true that there are much fewer of them.)

“Men tend to be drawn to more analytical majors such as engineering or business, whereas women enjoy the creativity that journalism allows for, she said.”

Analytical majors almost exclusively involve math, and almost exclusively involve problem-solving that results in a go/no-go outcome – either the product works or it doesn’t; either the business plan pays off or it doesn’t.

Writing, and especially journalism, deals with opinion and story-telling. The stories may be true (as with investigative journalism), but their expression into words (written or broadcast) is much harder to judge. Outright lies or plagarism are career-killers, but as long as you can write a coherent paragraph, you’re a journalist.

Bozoer Rebbe: I agree with your point, but those old patent drawings were made by artists trained in that field. And they’re a heck of a lot better than what you’ll see in today’s patents.

I notice that the lead question, “What, Precisely, is “Creativity”?” doesn’t get answered. That’s because there is no “precise” answer. It’s one of those things that you recognize when you see it, but it’s really hard to define.

tdaxp makes a good start, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Perople have been thinking about creativity for a very long time. Thinking hard about it started some time in the 50s [?] with people in the advertising industry. [See also Fritz Zwicky on morphology.] Bookshelves have been written about it. Schools teach it (even though some maintain it can’t be taught – it’s like being able to play the violin – either you can or you can’t). I believe everybody can be taught to improve on the creative ability they have.

Patrick M: You’re right. Edison didn’t walk around gazing into the sky. People who do that trip a lot. There are lots of famous cases of people suddenly being hit with the solution to a problem (remember Archimedes in the bathtub? Kekule and the benzene ring?), but the fact is, they’ve spent months and years thinking hard about the problem. Then, usually when they’re thinking about something else, the solution comes. Without all that preparation, you don’t break out of the box.

My brother fixes industrial machinery for a living. I did IT support for a while. We’ve discussed problem solving and troubleshooting. There’s a difference between a mechanic and a parts replacer. Like the old invoice says, 10 cents for the part $1,000 to know which part.

Two engineers may come up with acceptable solutions to a problem, both of them functional and elegant, and both completely different. Part of the genius of the patent system is that it motivates people to find a different way to accomplish the same task, hopefully a better way.

Speaking of patents, browse through some old patents and you’ll find marvelous patent drawings, absolutely beautiful line art. Fine art aficionados and journalism professors may think that engineers aren’t artist, but many engineers have pretty good chops as draftsmen.

I recently had an opportunity to pitch Telebrands with a consumer product idea I’d come up with only a few weeks ago. A friend who’s an engineer used Solidworks to make some pretty impressive images. Fine art? No. Creative? Hell yeah.

It’s one thing to draw a picture of a nude model, a still life, or a landscape. It’s another to draw a picture of something that doesn’t yet exist.

I would agree. And their editors are as well.

IMHO, the only part of the media that I would accept the “analysis/creativity” thing would be advertising. I am an ad designer and find that the best work comes from those who can think both “left brain” and “right brain.”

Not once have I received an answer that made any sense, or even that was delivered with any conviction.

So, I figure it’s all just a scam and the people in the media are in on it. It’s just a way to impose meaningless credentialism to keep out undesirables and generally reduce competition, same as any number of other credentialist or licensing schemes.

Which would explain a lot, if true.

btb, if anyone raeds that and has a good answer for my question, please post it.

and, obviously, I think this Dean is just blowing it out her cloaca. Turn it around and imagine a male Daen of an Enginneringschool making such an argument when asked why 70% of his students are male?

Analysis is the process of breaking difficult to grasp concepts into chunks that can be understood; creativity is the ability to percieve in those parts a greater underlying principle, and to express it.”

J.P. Guilford, who began the scientific study of creativity 60 years ago, would often use ‘divergent thinking’ for creativity, and ‘convergent thinking’ for intelligence, with just this distinction in mind.

– T. S. ELiot

Well, if you have negligible analytical ability, why not pat yourself on the back for one’s “Creativity”.Then one can be a wonderful person.

People who are intelligent or creative don’t brag about how wonderful they are.

Is Trimble insane or doesn’t he have a clue what’s going on in the advertising industry?

On the other hand, creativity can be quite beneficial to the engineering disciplines. Just look at the great products that the folks at Apple continually pump out.

Analysis is the process of breaking difficult to grasp concepts into chunks that can be understood; creativity is the ability to percieve in those parts a greater underlying principle, and to express it.

As for the engineering vs journalism example; that probably has a lot more to do with the fact that men are more willing to take risks than women are. That includes the risk of being proven wrong (as a mathematician, I can attest to the fact there is no group more merciless in ridicule than scientists when one is proven wrong; as an artist I can attest to the fact that since there is no real ability to prove right or wrong in the liberal arts, most arguments come down to who’s got the bigger posse.)

How much that willingness to take risk is a product of genetics, and how much is a product of culture, I’ll leave on the table….

I never had a journalism student in one of my classes, but when I was teaching an upper division physical chemistry lab, I had a lot of chem engineering students. One of them, doing a classic experiment on the vapor pressure of a liquid, reported a) negative kelvin temperatures, and b) a pressure with a logarithm equal to 35. I wish I had watched him do that experiment. It might be unwise to ascribe his results to creativity, though, unless utter disregard for what you are doing constitutes creativity. (He seemed remarkably sanguine at my rebukes. It was bad politics to fail someone from the engineering dept outright, so I made him do it again. I shudder to think that this young man might now manage operations at a pesticide or explosives plant…)

I have many liberal arts friends, some of them academics. Many do not at all realize that it takes creativity to solve problems. They think of science and engineering more as procedures than tools.

The mind boggles at the ignorance of the ‘intellectuals’ on the liberal arts side of the fence.

To use the above-mentioned algebra:
Logic + Facts = Science
Science + Inventiveness/creativity = Engineering

There is creativity in most every field of endeavor, but in each field that creativity has to abide by the rules – you optimize within the constraints of reality. Yes, you use both sides of the brain for that.

“I observed an even more insidious effect, however. A myth has grown up in our culture that truly creative people spend a lot of time gazing dreamily at the sky and then, WHAM!, a brilliant idea strikes! It’s not surprising why this idea is so attractive. It is an easy rationalization for, essentially, sitting around on your duff and pretending that you are being “creative.” I admit to using it to rationalize my own laziness at times.”

Indeed. Thomas Edison, a man with more creativity than any other American said it was 98% perspiration and 2% inspiration. That’s not to say that theta-wave inspiration isnt needed, but your brain has to be prepared with the fertile soil of thinking through the problem/challenge/expression attempted. A prepared mind can then take the next leaps.

Someone said: “I would bet that the lady quoted above is not talking about “creativity” in any kind of rigorous sense” Amazing, she is teaching the trade of dealing in words and lacks precision in her own use of them! What the J-school Dean Brill really means is “creativity” as defined as not being constrained and hemmed in by the rigors of facts, logic, and detailed analysis that the engineers suffer under. This is not RealityWorld where 2+2=4, but CreativityWorld, where you can write post-modernist mumbo-jumbo essays on how 2+2 could really be 5. It’s treating stupid and intellectually lazy as an odd sort of virtue.

What even funnier is that if you peel it back another layer, you have her basically saying the same thing that got Larry Summer fired from Presidency of Harvard Univ. – those women dont like those boring analytical fields because they arent wired for it: “It’s probably a right brain/left brain thing. That sounds sexist, but there’s some truth to it.”

Creativity in journalism? That’s a bug not a feature, and a truly mockable concept.
Journalism should be akin to the “Science of Current Events” – just the facts ma’am on what is going on. Anything beyond that is a donkey trying to tapdance (viz the Aesop Fable).

Journalists and reporters are not supposed to be creative. They are supposed to report on the facts as they are, without any “creative” license or selection in which facts the choose to report and which they choose to ignore.

Not only do they have to write persuasive proposals, they have to deliver persuasive presentations…which means more than droning through bullet points on a PowerPoint presentation. Colleges should really be teaching “rhetoric” in the classical sense, and anyone who is serious about their career should study it.

John Hiatt is a successful songwriter. He wrote Bonnie Riatt’s hit, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, among others that you’ve probably heard. He gets up every day, puts on his suit and goes in to his office where he writes music. He said that if he didn’t treat it like a job, he’d never get anything done.

Before the Beatles made it de rigueur for pop singers to write their own material, most popular music was written by people working in office buildings, like the legendary Brill Building in New York. Doc Pomus, Lieber & Stoller, Carol King, Paul Simon and others wrote some pretty creative stuff treating songwriting as a job.

One note. I’ve heard engineering students say that they don’t need to take any English or writing courses because they’re techies. I usually explain that even engineers have to write persuasive proposals and defend their ideas.