CREATIVE PROCESS

CREATIVE PROCESS (English creative process). Many brilliant people have reported that their discoveries are the result of the solution “somehow” appearing in their minds and that all they have to do is write down “heard” or “seen”. Similar circumstances accompanied, for example, the birth of the idea of ​​the Periodic Table of Elements by D. I. Mendeleev and by him. chemist A. Kekule of the cyclic formula of the benzene ring. The mystery of the act of "enlightenment" has long been associated with the presence of an external, sometimes divine source of creative inspiration.

Using the self-observation data of well-known scientists (eg, G. Helmholtz and A. Poincaré), Amer. psychologist Graham Wallace (1926) developed a scheme of 4 stages of T. p. According to this scheme, in the course of solving complex problems, people first go through the 1st stage of a long and laborious analysis of the problem, accumulation and processing of information, and make attempts to consciously solve the problem. As a rule, this phase ends in vain and the person retreats, “forgetting” about the problem for days and weeks. At this time, the 2nd stage of T. p. develops - maturation (incubation). It is characterized by the lack of visible progress in solving the problem. This is followed by the 3rd stage - insight (insight), followed by the 4th stage - checking the correctness of the decision. See also Productive Thinking (stages).

At the stage of maturation, apparently, the active work of the subconscious is of great importance. According to self-observation, a person, outwardly forgetting about the task, occupies his consciousness and attention with other things. Nevertheless, after some time, the “creative” task pops up on its own in consciousness, and it often turns out that if not a solution, then at least an understanding of the problem has turned out to be advanced. Thus, the impression arises of unconsciously proceeding decision processes. However, an important prerequisite for the productive work of the subconscious is the 1st stage - persistent conscious attempts to solve the problem.

An analysis of self-observations shows that the process of “enlightenment” is often not a one-time flash, but, as it were, is distributed over time. In the course of a persistent conscious process of decision, elements of understanding and movement in the right direction appear. Thus, the condition of the so-called. "Insight" is usually hard work. Conscious efforts, as it were, set in motion, "unwind" a powerful, but rather inertial machine of unconscious creativity. The same facts that sometimes the decision occurs during periods of rest, idleness, in the morning after sleep or during breakfast, perhaps only indicate that these periods usually take a lot of time for a person.

In studies of the interhemispheric organization of mental processes, it has been suggested that the frontal lobes of the right and left hemispheres make different contributions to the implementation of individual phases of T. p. consideration of products of creativity - with the work of the frontal lobe of the left (dominant) hemisphere.

The ability to be creative (creativity) is not strongly correlated with intellectual ability, although outstanding creative individuals undoubtedly have a very high IQ. With t. sp. theory of semantic networks, the fundamental difference between intellectual and creative activity, apparently, lies in the focus on solving different types of problems: understanding the meaning and generating a new meaning. The correlation of these activities is obvious, although there are examples of their independent existence. Creativity often manifests itself with external intellectual "retardation", but more often there is a presence of good intellectual abilities without a developed creative principle.

One of the options for interpreting the terms "understand" and "generate" m. b. associated with the next reasoning. The term "understand" implies the ability to track the course of other people's reasoning, that is, the ability of a person in the course of learning to form new connections between familiar concepts and new concepts themselves. The word “form” in this context is used in the sense of “form according to instructions”. A “person who understands” must constantly follow the external carrier of these connections and concepts, for example. following the teacher, the book, etc. He must also have exact recipes for his step-by-step mental actions.

A “creative person”, on the contrary, has the ability to generate concepts that are not externally conditioned by anything, the ability to draw conclusions that are unexpected for most people, which do not directly follow from anywhere and are considered as some kind of “jumps” of thinking (conscious or unconscious), breaks in the usual, standard logic of reasoning. In this regard, we note that a well-structured area of ​​knowledge is usually represented by a semantic network, the nodes of which are not located near each other; rather, they create whimsical with t. sp. topologies and fundamentally non-compact structures. Dr. In other words, it can be assumed that if some well-established system of facts and theoretical propositions eventually takes the form of a compact section of the network, then after performing a certain creative act, this network includes some unexpected, strange and, therefore, remote (in the original space) nodes of knowledge. In terms of understanding the mechanisms of T. p., an analogy between the structure of a semantic network and the structure of a neural ensemble is appropriate.

When comparing the acts of "generation" and "understanding" a certain paradox is revealed. A characteristic feature of the “understanding person” is the ability to assimilate a certain system of knowledge, i.e., to form a copy of the connections between concepts created earlier by the “creative person”. This work on copying a section of the semantic network is not a purely mechanical act and requires a number of complex preliminary formation operations: initial concepts, lists of attributes (properties) of these concepts, a new system of priorities among attributes, etc. Thus, the difference between understanding and creativity is, at best, the difference between the original and the copy! In fact, this is the difference between the act of creating an original, which appears to an outside observer as a miracle, and an act of conscientious, laborious, but devoid of any secret copying.

The effectiveness of T. p. in terms of the mechanisms of semantic networks is possibly associated with a combination of several factors (abilities).
1. The ability to quickly and, most importantly, constantly going through the set of options for connections between existing concepts (network nodes). It should be taken into account that in this model, each network node is a set or list of attributes that describe this concept, and the implementation of a complete enumeration requires, generally speaking, catastrophically rapidly growing time and memory costs. In this regard, the way out of the enumeration problem is associated with the presence of abilities that determine the possibility of forming procedures for a "truncated", incomplete, selective enumeration. Several types of trace are important in this regard. abilities.
2. The ability to form an open, in the sense of a constantly generated (supplemented and changed), list of attributes of c.-l. phenomena or concepts. Obviously, the lists of attributes and their priorities should change depending on the task and subject area. This ability is important in view of the fact that the characteristics of the studied phenomena are sets of initial parameters used to enumerate combinations.
3. The ability to form a successful system of priorities among the options for links being prepared for enumeration. The mechanism of this process, in particular, can be associated with the establishment of pairs of well-matching attributes, where the pair includes one attribute from each concept included in the relationship. At the same time, priority systems should change depending on the problem being solved (subject area).
4. Ability to form new concepts (nodes). This procedure can be considered as a cyclic (iterative) process of forming a method for constructing a deductive and/or inductive reasoning based on the available facts and concepts, i.e. based on previously formed network sections and connections between them.

Within the framework of such a model, both individual differences in creativity and differences in creative success among the same people in different subject areas become clear. Indeed, suppose that on a k.-l. At the stage of reasoning, a certain person has developed a “successful” system of priorities for options for enumerating features (or other elements of reasoning). As a result, this person in this situation will show himself as a creative person. However, in the case of reasoning in a different subject area, the same subject will use a different, otherwise organized knowledge base, which has developed, for example, as a result of a less successful learning process (bad teacher, unsuccessful textbook) or as a result of a lack of interest in this area knowledge. As a result, he will not show himself as a creative person. (V. M. Krol.)

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Being a creative person means more than having certain traits. It means being creative, approaching the challenges we face with imagination and originality. In short, it means demonstrating skill in applying the creative process. Although the authorities disagree on the number of stages in this process - some say three, others - four, five or seven - these differences do not concern fundamental things. They consist only in whether to combine actions under one heading or several. There are no significant differences regarding the main actions discussed.

For ease of remembering and ease of use, we will consider the creative process as consisting of four stages: finding problems, formulating a specific problem or a specific controversial issue, exploring them, and creating a set of ideas. Each of these steps will be the subject of a separate lesson, but a brief overview of the entire process will allow you to start applying it right away.

First stage: Search for tasks
The essence of creativity is to approach problems in an imaginative, original, and effective way. Often there is no need to search for tasks; they confront you in the form of obvious problems and contentious issues. For example, if your dorm roommate comes home every day at two or three in the morning, comes in noisily and starts talking to you when you're trying to sleep, you don't have to be very perceptive to know you have a problem. Or if you find yourself in the midst of a heated debate about whether abortion is murder, no one needs to tell you that you will be speaking out on the controversial issue.

However, not all tasks are so obvious. Sometimes problems and contentious issues are so small and subtle that only a very few people pay attention to them; in other cases, there are no problems or disputes at all, and there is only an opportunity to improve the existing situation. Such tasks will not cause you strong emotions, so you will not find them if you just sit and wait - you have to look for them.

The first stage of the creative process is the habit of looking for tasks - not at any particular time, but constantly. Its importance is reflected in the fact that you can only be creative in response to tasks that you are aware of.

Step Two: Formulating the Problem or Controversy
The purpose of this stage is to find the best formulation of the problem or issue, the formulation that will lead to the most valuable ideas36. "A problem properly formulated," Henry Hazlitt observed, "is half solved." Since different formulations open up different directions for thought, it is best to consider as many formulations as possible. One of the most common mistakes when dealing with problems and controversial issues is to consider them from only one point of view, thereby closing off many promising directions for thought.

Take the prisoner mentioned earlier when he was considering how to escape from prison. His first formulation of the problem seems to have been, "How can I get a gun and shoot back out of here?" or "How do I provoke the guards to open my cell so I can disarm them?" If he had stopped at this formulation, he would still be where he was. His elaborate escape plan could only have been born in response to the question, “How can I cut a grate without a saw?”

Often, after formulating a problem or issue in many ways, you will not be able to decide what is the best wording. If this happens, delay the decision until the next steps in the process allow you to make a final decision.

Stage Three: Researching the Problem or Controversy
The purpose of this stage is to obtain the information necessary to effectively work on a problem or issue. In some cases, this will only mean looking for suitable material in your past experience and observations that is suitable for solving a given problem. Others will require gaining new information through new experiences and observations, conversations with informed people, or your own research. (In the case of that prisoner, this meant carefully examining all available places and objects in the prison.)

Fourth Stage: Generating Ideas
The goal of this stage is to generate enough ideas to decide what action to take or what opinion to adopt. At this stage, there are often two obstacles. The first is an often unconscious tendency to limit one's ideas to common, familiar, traditional responses and to block out unusual and unfamiliar ones. Fight this tendency by remembering that however alien and inappropriate the reactions of the latter kind may seem, it is in these reactions that creativity emerges.

The second hurdle is the temptation to interrupt the ideation process too hastily. As we'll see in later lessons, research has shown that the longer you keep creating ideas, the more likely you are to come up with great ideas. Or, as one writes

There's one last question that needs to be cleared up before you're ready to start practicing the creative process: how do you know you've found a creative idea? What characteristics will you be able to distinguish it from other ideas? A creative idea is an idea that is both imaginative and effective. The second quality is no less important than the first. It is not enough that the idea is unusual. If that were the case, then the strangest, most eccentric ideas would be the most creative ones. No, in order to be creative, an idea must “work,” must solve a problem or clarify the issue it answers. A creative idea shouldn't just be extraordinary - it should be extraordinarily good. Here is the standard that you should apply when considering the ideas you have created.

Once you've generated a large number of ideas, decide which one seems best to you. Sometimes it will be just one idea; in other cases, a combination of two or more ideas. At this stage, your decision should be preliminary. Otherwise, you will have a strong desire to forego the important critical thinking process by which ideas are evaluated.

There is an opinion that a creative person sits and waits for an idea to dawn on him. In comics, in such cases, a lamp falls on the head of the hero. In fact, most people who come up with great ideas will tell you that it's hard work. They read, study, analyze, check and recheck, sweat, swear, worry, and sometimes give up. Major discoveries in science or medicine can take years, decades, even generations. An unusual, unexpected, new idea does not come easily.

Of course, everyone may come up with one or two ideas, but in fact, as Osterman, editor of Adweek, noted, many of them are either impractical or you go beyond the product strategy. This is especially true for ideas that come up on their own. Ideas appear randomly, but with a systematic approach, which is shown in rice. 13-4, they can be obtained in an organized manner.

Despite the differences in terms, the various descriptions of the creative process are broadly similar to each other. The creative process is usually described as a series of sequential steps. In 1926, the English sociologist Graham Walls first named these steps in the creative process. He named them like this: preparation, incubation, insight and verification 9 .

A more detailed description of the creative process is offered by Alex Osborne, former head of the agency BBDO, founded the Foundation for Creative Education in New York State, which has its own workshops and a magazine:

1. Orientation - problem definition.

2. Preparation - Gathering relevant information.

3. Analysis - classification of the collected material.

4. Formation of ideas - collection of different variants of ideas.

5. Incubation - waiting, during which insight comes.

6. Synthesis - development of a solution.

7. Evaluation - consideration of ideas received 10 .

While the steps and titles are slightly different, all creative strategies share a few of the same key points. Researchers have found that ideas come after a person has immersed himself in a problem and worked himself up to the point where he wants to quit. Preparation and analysis is the main period of the most difficult work, when you read, research and learn everything about this problem.

Then comes ideation time, when you play with the material, turning the problem on its head and looking at it from different points of view. This is also the period of the birth of ideas. Most creative people use a physical way to come up with ideas - sketching something on paper, walking, running, riding an elevator up and down, going to a movie theater, or eating certain foods. This is a very personal technique that is used to create the right mood. The task of this stage is to collect the maximum number of ideas. The more ideas collected, the better the final concept will be."

The process of analyzing, comparing different ideas and associations is tedious for most people. You may run into a blank wall and give up. This is what James Webb Young calls “brain work.” But it is necessary.

Incubation - the most interesting part of the process. At this time, your conscious mind is resting, allowing the subconscious mind to solve the problem. In other words, when you get frustrated or angry because you are not

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Ideas come, do something that will allow you to forget about the problem, and then the subconscious will begin to work.

insight- an unexpected moment when an idea comes. Usually an idea appears at the most unexpected time: not when you are sitting at the table, straining your brain, but, for example, late in the evening before going to bed or in the morning when you wake up. At the most unexpected moment, the pieces come together, and the solution becomes obvious.

One of the most important is the test or evaluation stage, where you go back to the very beginning and objectively review your great idea. Is it really all that great? Understandably? Does your idea fit the strategy? Most people working on the creative side of advertising admit that many of their best ideas just didn't work. Ideas might be great, but they didn't solve a problem or achieve a particular goal. Lyricists also admit that sometimes ideas that seemed great did not excite them the next day or a week later.

Grade involves making the decision to continue working, which every creative person should do. Craig Weatherup, President pepsi, explained: "You need to see your target clearly ... and you must have the nerve to pull the trigger." In the agency BBDO they say: "In Pepsi get rejected a lot. For every commercial we go to a client with, there are probably 9 commercials that he turned down.”

Idea Formation

Shaping refers to the process of obtaining an original idea. Idea formation occurs in the development of a new product and its name, positioning, strategic planning, cost reduction, modernization, and the development of big ideas in advertising. William Miller, President Global Creativity in Austin, Texas, says that all creative people working in advertising can be divided into 4 groups, each of which uses one of four innovative styles:

in Style imagination: those who imagine the end result and work towards what they want to create. in Style modifications: those who prefer to go step by step investigate the problem and build on the knowledge already acquired. in Style experiment: those who experiment, test, answer questions about the product or target market, about Style research: those who seek to explore the unknown and love adventure. 12 Brainstorming is an idea formation technique developed in the early 1950s. Alex Osborne from the agency B.B.D.O. This technique uses associative thinking in the creative group. Osborne gathered a group of 6-10 people at the agency and asked them to submit their ideas. The idea of ​​one can stimulate another, and the combined power of group associations generates many more ideas than the members of the group can do individually. The secret to brainstorming is to stay positive. The rule says that evaluation should be postponed. Negative thoughts can disrupt the informal atmosphere that is needed to get a new idea.

Other type divergent thinking uses such analogies and metaphors as in advertising Wrigley (Fig. 13.2). Young's definition of an idea is also based on the ability to see new patterns or relationships. When you think analogy, you are saying that one thing is similar to another that has nothing to do with it. William D. D. Gordon, a creative thinker, found that new ideas were often expressed in analogies. He developed a program called synectics, who taught people how to solve problems with analogies 13 .

creative process (English creative process)- many brilliant people reported that their discoveries are the result of the fact that the decision "somehow" arises in their minds and that they only have to write down "heard" or "seen". Similar circumstances accompanied, for example, the birth of D.I. Mendeleev's ideas of the Periodic system of elements and in him. chemist A. Kekule of the cyclic formula of the benzene ring. The mystery of the act of "enlightenment" has long been associated with the presence of an external, sometimes divine source of creative inspiration.

At the stage of maturation, apparently, the active work of the subconscious is of great importance. According to self-observation, a person, outwardly forgetting about the task, occupies his consciousness and attention with other things. Nevertheless, after some time, the “creative” task pops up in the mind on its own, and it often turns out that if not a solution, then at least the understanding of the problem turned out to be advanced. Thus, the impression arises of unconsciously proceeding decision processes. However, an important prerequisite for the productive work of the subconscious is the 1st stage - persistent conscious attempts to solve the problem.

An analysis of self-observations shows that the process of “enlightenment” is often not a one-time flash, but, as it were, is distributed over time. In the course of a persistent conscious process of decision, elements of understanding and movement in the right direction appear. Thus, the condition of the so-called. "Insight" is usually hard work. Conscious efforts, as it were, set in motion, "unwind" a powerful, but rather inertial machine of unconscious creativity. The same facts that sometimes the decision occurs during periods of rest, idleness, in the morning after sleep or during breakfast, perhaps only indicate that these periods usually take a lot of time for a person.

In studies of the interhemispheric organization of mental processes, it has been suggested that the frontal lobes of the right and left hemispheres make different contributions to the implementation of individual phases of T. p. consideration of products of creativity - with the work of the frontal lobe of the left (dominant) hemisphere.

English creative process). Many brilliant people reported that their discoveries are the result of the fact that the decision "somehow" arises in their minds and that they only have to write down "heard" or "seen." Similar circumstances accompanied, for example, the birth of the idea of ​​the Periodic Table of Elements by D. I. Mendeleev and by him. chemist A. Kekule of the cyclic formula of the benzene ring. The mystery of the act of "illumination" has long been associated with the presence of an external, sometimes divine source of creative inspiration.

Using the self-observation data of well-known scientists (eg, G. Helmholtz and A. Poincaré), Amer. psychologist Graham Wallace (1926) developed a scheme of 4 stages of T. p. According to this scheme, in the course of solving complex problems, people first go through the 1st stage of a long and laborious analysis of the problem, accumulation and processing of information, and make attempts to consciously solve the problem. As a rule, this phase ends in vain and the person retreats, "forgetting" about the problem for days and weeks. At this time, the 2nd stage of T. p. develops - maturation (incubation). It is characterized by the lack of visible progress in solving the problem. This is followed by the 3rd stage - insight (insight), followed by the 4th stage - checking the correctness of the decision. See also Productive Thinking (stages).

At the stage of maturation, apparently, the active work of the subconscious is of great importance. According to self-observation, a person, outwardly forgetting about the task, occupies his consciousness and attention with other things. Nevertheless, after some time, the "creative" task independently pops up in consciousness, and it often turns out that if not a solution, then at least an understanding of the problem has turned out to be advanced. Thus, the impression arises of unconsciously proceeding decision processes. However, an important prerequisite for the productive work of the subconscious is the 1st stage - persistent conscious attempts to solve the problem.

An analysis of self-observations shows that the process of "enlightenment" is often not a one-time flash, but, as it were, is distributed over time. In the course of a persistent conscious process of decision, elements of understanding and movement in the right direction appear. Thus, the condition of the so-called. "Insight" is usually served by hard work. Conscious efforts, as it were, set in motion, "unwind" a powerful, but rather inertial machine of unconscious creativity. The same facts that sometimes the decision occurs during periods of rest, idleness, in the morning after sleep or during breakfast, perhaps only indicate that these periods usually take a lot of time for a person.

In studies of the interhemispheric organization of mental processes, it has been suggested that the frontal lobes of the right and left hemispheres make different contributions to the implementation of individual phases of T. p. consideration of products of creativity - with the work of the frontal lobe of the left (dominant) hemisphere.

The ability to be creative (creativity) is not strongly correlated with intellectual ability, although outstanding creative individuals undoubtedly have a very high IQ. With t. sp. theory of semantic networks, the fundamental difference between intellectual and creative activity, apparently, lies in the focus on solving different types of problems: understanding the meaning and generating a new meaning. The correlation of these activities is obvious, although there are examples of their independent existence. Creativity often manifests itself with external intellectual "retardation", but more often there is a presence of good intellectual abilities without a developed creative principle.

One of the options for interpreting the terms "understand" and "generate" m. b. associated with the next reasoning. The term "understand" implies the ability to track the course of other people's reasoning, that is, the ability of a person in the course of learning to form new connections between familiar concepts and new concepts themselves. The word "form" in this context is used in the sense of "form according to instructions". An "understanding person" must constantly follow the external carrier of these connections and concepts, for example, following a teacher, a book, etc. He must also have precise recipes for his step-by-step mental actions.

A “creative person”, on the contrary, has the ability to generate concepts that are not externally conditioned by anything, the ability to draw conclusions that are unexpected for most people, which do not directly follow from anywhere and are considered as some kind of “jumps” of thinking (conscious or unconscious), breaks in the usual, standard logic of reasoning. In this regard, we note that a well-structured area of ​​knowledge is usually represented by a semantic network, the nodes of which are not located near each other; rather, they create whimsical with t. sp. topologies and fundamentally non-compact structures. Dr. In other words, it can be assumed that if some well-established system of facts and theoretical propositions eventually takes the form of a compact section of the network, then after performing a certain creative act, this network includes some unexpected, strange and, therefore, remote (in the original space) nodes of knowledge. In terms of understanding the mechanisms of T. p., an analogy between the structure of a semantic network and the structure of a neural ensemble is appropriate.

When comparing the acts of "generation" and "understanding" a certain paradox is revealed. A characteristic feature of the “understanding person” is the ability to assimilate a certain system of knowledge, i.e., to form a copy of the connections between concepts created earlier by the “creative person”. This work on copying a section of the semantic network is not a purely mechanical act and requires a number of complex preliminary formation operations: initial concepts, lists of attributes (properties) of these concepts, a new system of priorities among attributes, etc. Thus, the difference between understanding and creativity is, at best, the difference between the original and the copy! In fact, this is the difference between the act of creating an original, which appears to an outside observer as a miracle, and an act of conscientious, laborious, but devoid of any secret copying.

The effectiveness of T. p. in terms of the mechanisms of semantic networks is possibly associated with a combination of several factors (abilities).

1. The ability to quickly and, most importantly, constantly going through the set of options for connections between existing concepts (network nodes). It should be taken into account that in this model, each network node is a set or list of attributes that describe this concept, and the implementation of a complete enumeration requires, generally speaking, catastrophically rapidly growing time and memory costs. In this regard, the way out of the enumeration problem is associated with the presence of abilities that determine the possibility of forming procedures for "truncated", incomplete, selective enumeration. Several types of trace are important in this regard. abilities.

2. The ability to form an open, in the sense of a constantly generated (supplemented and changed), list of attributes of c.-l. phenomena or concepts. Obviously, the lists of attributes and their priorities should change depending on the task and subject area. This ability is important in view of the fact that the characteristics of the studied phenomena are sets of initial parameters used to enumerate combinations.

3. The ability to form a successful system of priorities among the options for links being prepared for enumeration. The mechanism of this process, in particular, can be associated with the establishment of pairs of well-matching attributes, where the pair includes one attribute from each concept included in the relationship. At the same time, priority systems should change depending on the problem being solved (subject area).

4. Ability to form new concepts (nodes). This procedure can be considered as a cyclic (iterative) process of forming a method for constructing a deductive and/or inductive reasoning based on the available facts and concepts, i.e. based on previously formed network sections and connections between them.

Within the framework of such a model, both individual differences in creativity and differences in creative success among the same people in different subject areas become clear. Indeed, suppose that on a k.-l. At the stage of reasoning, a certain person has developed a "successful" system of priorities for options for enumerating features (or other elements of reasoning). As a result, this person in this situation will show himself as a creative person. However, in the case of reasoning in a different subject area, the same subject will use a different, otherwise organized knowledge base, which has developed, for example, as a result of a less successful learning process (bad teacher, unsuccessful textbook) or as a result of a lack of interest in this area knowledge. As a result, he will not show himself as a creative person. (V. M. Krol.)