Design skills are becoming increasingly important in order to be able to offer customers individual and high-quality products. But how can “professional” creativity be learned and integrated into everyday working life?
Design skills are becoming increasingly important in order to be able to offer customers individual and high-quality products. But how can “professional” creativity be learned and integrated into everyday working life?
Photo/© Sergey Nivens/fotolia.com
The term creativity comes from the Latin word “creare”, which means “to create, invent, produce, make something new”, but also “to choose”. All in all, skills that sometimes make up the stonemason’s trade. Beate Amrehn, craft designer and design consultant at the Academy for Craft Design Aachen, associates the term creativity with a more amateurish idea of design. This is often based on the idea that designing means letting your mind wander and dreamily pondering thoughts at your desk. That may be nice, but it doesn’t have much to do with professional design skills. Stonemasons are creative and customer-oriented by profession, which means they offer an individual product as a service. It is about a targeted approach that ideally meets the customer’s wishes and at the same time corresponds to the stonemason’s design requirements.
If a creative idea strikes like a bolt of lightning, this is beneficial in this process, but not essential. After all, everyone can learn design, albeit to a different degree depending on their predisposition. What is needed is interest and curiosity for the design process. Our table shows some of the techniques that can be used to learn creativity in everyday life.
The engine of creativity: laziness or diligence?
The non-fiction author and freelance psychologist Ulrich Beer from Eisenbach explored the question of whether laziness is not ultimately the precondition for all creativity. If we hadn’t been too lazy to walk, said Beer, the bicycle and car would probably never have been invented. If we hadn’t been too lazy to write, there would be no printing press, typewriter or computer. Dean Keith Simonton from the University of California, on the other hand, has come to the conclusion that creativity only arises through the process of action. In every profession that Simonton examined as part of several studies, the same result emerged: creativity depends on the amount of work done. Whether scientists, artists, writers or inventors – geniuses such as Leonardo da Vinci or Pablo Picasso did not have a higher success rate than their peers. They were simply more productive – resulting in more successes, but also more failures. Diligence is therefore what distinguishes geniuses from others.
You can find out more about learning creativity in STEIN in July 2014. In this issue, we have also compiled an overview of the various further training opportunities in this field.
