10 Creative Ideas About Creativity
UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture is holding a series of conversations called 10 Questions: Centennial Edition as part of the university’s centennial celebration. Every Tuesday evening through December 3, interdisciplinary experts are taking the stage at Kaufman Hall to address big questions including “What is citizenship?,” “What matters?” and coming up next Tuesday, “What is community?” Each talk is open to the public, free with RSVP. Can’t attend? KCET be sharing weekly highlights.
"On Tuesday, November 12, three people who are creative in different ways attempted to answer the question, “What is creativity?” Astrophysicist Andrea Ghez, user experience designer Evan Sullivan, and choreographer Kyle Abraham talked about everything from what it means to be creative to how we can overcome creative fears. Here are ten things we learned along the way.
World Arts and Cultures/Dance Professor Kyle Abraham leading a choreography demonstration on stage 1. If you want to be creative, start by asking questions. Victoria Marks, professor of choreography and associate dean of academic affairs for the UCLA School of Art and Architecture, is moderating the 10 Questions series. She started the talk by suggesting that questions are the “catalyst of creativity,” and that “Not knowing is the springboard to new ideas.”
2. Asking questions is how we create new knowledge. Andrea Ghez’s work focuses on the question, “Is there a super massive black hole at the center of the galaxy?” She said that while classes often teach us how to answer the questions that are posed to us, if we want to advance our knowledge, we have to be asking the right questions. She thinks of the creative process in a visual way. “I feel like it's a process of walking around the boundaries of our knowledge, knocking on those walls, asking, ‘Where's it weak?’”
3. Answering questions takes effort. Ghez shared four things that help the process:
1) New tools that give you a different viewpoint and push your knowledge further (the Keck telescope did this for her)
2) The willingness to go against the grain, take risks, and feel uncomfortable
3) The ability to constantly expose yourself to new ideas
4) Quiet time alone, away from our noisy world "— ***AUTHOR'S NAME***, ***ARTICLE DATE***
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the KCET website.
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