Creativity – The Cart Before the Horse?

A couple of weeks ago a new publication coming out of the UK crossed my desk.  Overall, Learning to Live, which focuses on young people and museum education, is excellent.

 

But I couldn’t help being annoyed by one thing.  It keeps talking about creativity, and how important creativity is.

 

Don’t get me wrong.  I think creativity is incredibly important and should absolutely be nurtured in children, both in and out of museums. 

 

But I couldn’t help thinking that a critical step was missing. 

 

And that is the nurturing of curiosity.  If you are not curious about something, you are not going to bother to expend an ounce of creativity on it.  Right?

 

Granted, I have been curious about curiosity for a while.  And I must confess I have my colleagues curious about it too, now.

 

Why?  One of the things we have noticed is that museum visitors who are personally motivated to visit museums are much more likely to identify themselves as being curious.  And visitors who do not identify themselves as curious tend to be less engaged in the museum and its offerings (and tend to visit for reasons other than personal ones). 

 

We have been tracking curiosity as a motivation for museum-going in a few of our studies, and have found that visitors who identify themselves as “curious” are significantly more positive about the museum, more likely to believe the staff cares about them, and more likely to support the museum for philanthropic reasons versus just the family budget.  That is, curious adults are more likely to be what we call “Museum Advocates.”  

 

And we believe that curious adults are much more likely to raise curious children, for whom creativity is a natural outgrowth. 

 

We’ll keep studying this in our research, and would love to hear your thoughts about curiosity and creativity as we plan out future lines of inquiry.  To comment, please feel free to click on “Comments” below (or if you are reading this from your e-mail subscription to this blog, please go to our website to add a comment.

-Susie

Comments

[Jennifer Caleshu, Bay Area Discovery Museum]

Very interesting Susie! We've been spending a lot of time discussing the components of the creative process here at the Bay Area Discovery Museum, as we are dedicated to developing childhood creativity, nurturing future generations of creative thinkers and innovators. How exactly do we do that? After all, "creativity" isn't a "result" but rather an intrinsic part of the the human experience - that all to often is de-emphasized by years of teach-to-the-test schooling. Informal educational venues like museums, and especially hands-on children's museums - nurture creativity, provide opportunities to "practice" creativity - way beyond its traditional definition of creativity = music/art, but instead demonstrating how creativity can be applied to any discipline.

We provide open-ended, child-directed experiences - opportunities to explore, discover, immerse, imagine, connect - these essential elements of the creative process. I'd say that to us, curiosity is an element of the creative process - that you are providing charismatic, immersive experiences that children are drawn to, naturally stimulating their creativity.

[Ken Bubp]

Our far-sighted CEO Ellen Rosenthal "slipped" the word curiosity into our mission statement about five years ago. Actually, the statement was developed with staff teams and she served as the final staff editor, so I'm not entirely sure where it originated from. Still, it is a powerful word that I didn't realize had so much power at the time.

As in, "Conner Prairie fosters curiosity...". Only over the last 18+ months has that word even begun to resonate with me in the way you describe it in this post. I think it is exactly right.

Building a nation of curious learners seems like a good goal for museums. Curiousity can, but does not have to, lead to creativity. Curiosity opens worlds up. It is an actually attainable aspiration the broader field could embrace (vs. so many warm-and-fuzzy aspirations we wish could happen), and that we at Conner Prairie Interactive History Park are trying to live out.

This is a rich vein to mine, I think.

[James Chung, Reach Advisors]

Love the comments on this topic so far. Jennifer, it sounds like the Bay Area Discovery Museum gives this issue a ton of thought and puts it into practice. I look forward to seeing that work first hand. Ken, it figures that you and Ellen have already been drilling into this issue at Conner Prairie.

One of the points raised in the comments above is whether or not there's a linkage between curiosity and creativity. It's just one of the rather interesting issues for which we're really chomping at the bit to dig deeper. We really, really look forward to kicking this concept around more with Ken, Jennifer, and anyone who wishes to contribute to this discussion as we think through the next wave of research on this topic.

[Jennifer Caleshu, Bay Area Discovery Museum]

James, I absolutely think there's a link between curiosity and creativity. When I think about creativity, I think about novelty and new-ness - of ideas, solutions to problems - creativity = creation of new.

"Creativity is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. An alternative conception of creativity is that it is simply the act of making something new.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity"

And what spurs you to create something new - curiosity: "How does this work - can I do it differently? What happens when I combine x and y?"

An alternative way to approach the issue is to say, can you have creativity without curiosity? A scientist is inherently curious (the scientific process is by definition seeking novel solutions, testing the "what if"). A musician (traditionally creative field) - are they being curious? They are seeking new ways to interpret sound - so they are being curious about the new ways - what if, in a different sense.

Or, can you have curiosity without creativity? This is where I think the more close-ended experiences of some science museums fall down - "What happens when I push this button? Oh. The light lights up." Compare that with the open-ended exploration of children's museums - even in a science context, one hopes you see experiences that allow children to discover phenomena with a set end product or goal - that allows for more creativity IMHO.

Looking forward to more discussion!

[Jennifer Caleshu, Bay Area Discovery Museum]

whoops - meant "one hopes you see experiences that allow children to discover phenomena without a set end product or goal"

[Jay Rounds, University of Missouri-St. Louis]

One way of framing the relationship between curiosity and creativity is to follow Csikszentmihalyi (and most creativity theorists)in arguing that originality alone is not sufficient for creativity. To count as creative, an idea must be both original and useful. By contrast, curiosity is intrinsically motivated, and so, by definition, does not involve any expected usefulness. It is what motivates us to learn things that we don't need to know at present (although it may prove useful in the future). Thus, yes, it is possible to have curiosity without creativity, and insisting on concrete "outcomes" for exhibit experiences may in fact interfere with the visitor's curiosity.

I discussed aspects of this in my article "Strategies for the Curiosity Driven Museum Visitor" (CURATOR, October 2004, Vol. 47, No. 4). In that article I cited a specific connection between curiosity and creativity: a key driver of creative thought is the subconscious recognition of surprising connections between things that were assumed to be unrelated. Curiosity-driven learning leads us to build up a wide ranging stock of information that this subconscious process can draw upon. Highly creative people in any field necessarily have deep knowledge of their own field, but they also tend to explore more outside of their specialty than do less creative members of that field. Thus, their intuition draws upon a much more diverse range of knowledge. Perhaps someone can be creative without being curious, but curiosity is clearly related to exceptional creativity.

Csikszentmihalyi's book on creativity is a good source on this. Also, the Spring 1999 issue of EXHIBITIONIST was devoted to creativity, as was the Winter 2005 issue of JOURNAL OF MUSEUM EDUCATION.