A+ for Creativity

Seemingly, creativity has no set definition because it seems that it can be widely interpreted.  We all have original ideas, but the majority stems from previous ideas of our own and our peers.  Once we come up with an idea, a better one seems to come right after, as your original idea gives a basis of a new and improved thought.  Relating to the activity we did in class, when we were typing what creativity is, I typed an idea and it immediately sparked another thought in my head about the same idea, just wording and/or changing the direction of thought.  Creativity varies from person to person, some more creative than others.  It’s one thing to have creativity, but it begs to ask the question what exactly is creativity?  Is it something that everyone is born with or is it selective, does everyone have it but some are more prominent than others?  Some people have more natural creativity than others who have to work at it but everyone has the slightest bit of creativity.  No matter what, everyone always gets an A+ for creativity!

Creativity seems like having or doing something that hasn’t been executed prior, an inventive way to do something.  The process of creativity stems from discovery, originality, composition and intellectual property.  This presents the crisis of invention, coming up with a completely new idea that hasn’t been thought of.  When we think of invention that might be the general thought that comes to mind but it usually combines objects or thoughts that preexist and using them to come up with something different.  Inventions seem to just be remixes of an original idea when building off of a preexisting idea.  Using something that someone’s already created as the basis of your invention could become problematic when it seems too similar to the original.  In relation to memes, the process of inventing of them is using a picture and typing words over it.  Most memes are the same picture with different words written over, which is just variations of the idea.  There are imitations, which are seen as improvements or speaking to a crowd differently and multivariate interpretations that cause different reactions to the same meme.  A meme's success deals with fecundity, the fitting to the situation, which makes it easy to generate; longevity, how long the meme lasts; and copy fidelity, which is the applicability of the meme.  The stronger the connection and relation to the audience is, the more successful the meme.

In relation to creativity, the discovery process includes finding something unthought-of before which might become difficult because it seems like everything has already been done.  These just seem like differentiations of the same idea, bettering or turning it into another direction that wasn’t thought of prior.  This ties into originality because someone having a particular idea before anyone else is original, however someone else basing their new idea off that doesn’t exactly seem “original” because it’s already been done even though their end product is brand new.  Taking an idea from someone and furthering seems like a troublesome situation because it’s essentially stealing someone’s idea and making it your own when you had no inventive thought, rather taking someone else’s idea which could possibly be extremely successful and not giving any credit to the other person.  Let’s call it stealing, rather, copying someone’s original idea.  You’re taking something that wasn’t yours, not giving any credibility to the original thinker and possibly having a huge success.  Composition is how you take on and execute the idea.  This is interesting to observe because it’s the process of one person’s thought becoming an (physical) object.  Nobody is exactly similar which helps come up with new ideas as we can bounce off of other people’s ideas thus generating new ones.  An example of composition would be Steve Jobs from Apple thinking about inventing the first iPhone.  Thinking that if he thought to execute it another way or use a different system than iOS how different the phone would look and function.  

Imagining how different a product could be if someone else came up with it is thought provoking because there are seemingly endless directions a single idea can go.  This shows that nobody’s creativity is the same and that we all have variations of the same feature.  Sometimes people are more creative when given constraints, which act as a deadline or limitation that must be worked around.  Others are creative almost all of the time naturally, showing how different we all think and produce our thoughts.  We seem to think of the same concept differently, showing how dissimilar our minds work whenever we're presented with a new concept or blank slate.