YOU Are Creative, But You May Not Know It Yet

Written by Education Intern, Alicia Bucks

“Every child is an artist.  The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up” -Picasso.

Somewhere along the way to adulthood, be it through regimented school curriculums or the pressures of our economic system, many people lose the belief that they are creatively talented.  An article published recently by Psychology Today, entitled Creative Thinkering: Resurrecting your natural creativity through inspiring techniques and practical examples describes twelve aspects of creative thinking that for the most part go untaught.  The article is written by Michael Michalko, an expert in the field of inventive thinking.  The first, and arguably most important, of these twelve aspects of creative thinking that often go ignored is: YOU ARE CREATIVE!   This means that there is no intrinsic difference between a renowned artist and a person who does not pursue any creative endeavors.  The difference lies within people’s beliefs about themselves.  Michalko explains that all people are born with the ability to be creative, spontaneous thinkers, but as they form their self-identity they either choose to believe they are creative individuals or believe they are simply uncreative, as if there was some sort of special essence these “creative types” have that they must be lacking.  The expression of this self-identity leads people to either pursue creative projects, and therefore develop their creative thinking skills, or to write them off completely.  Michalko explains, “the reality is that believing you are not creative excuses you from trying or attempting anything new.  When someone tells you that they are not creative, you are talking to someone who has no interest and will make no effort to be a creative thinker.”   This sort of denial of a person’s own creative ability can easily turn into a lifelong self-administered stifling of one of the most beautiful aspects of being human, the ability to create.  The wonderful thing about the Children’s Creativity Museum is that it gives visitors the opportunity and encourages them to realize that they are creative, even if they have lived their whole lives denying their abilities and depriving themselves of the fulfillment creative endeavors often bring.  Through CCM’s education philosophy of “Imagine, Create, Share,” visitors of all ages are able to bring their sometimes forgotten creative sides to life.

Children and adults alike who enter the doors of Children’s Creativity Museum become instantly immersed in CCM’s education Philosophy, which is encapsulated in a design process referred to as, “Imagine, Create, Share.”  This process is a great way of easing people into creative endeavors without any of the pressure often associated with making art.  In each of the numerous interactive exhibits at the museum, from the Animation Studio, to the Innovation Lab, to the Music Studio, and beyond, visitors are encouraged to Imagine, Create, and Share in ways that conventional schooling and workplaces often ignore.  Visitors Imagine, maybe for the first time in years.  They are given the opportunity to try out something new, observe the creations of others, get inspired, and let their imagination run wild.  — Simply put, play!  Being not only allowed, but encouraged to do this can reawaken the creativity that so often lies dormant in people who believe themselves to be uncreative.

Once visitors are drawn in to one of the numerous activities available at CCM through Imagination, Educators facilitate an environment where everyone feels free to let their creative juices start flowing.  A big part of the creative process at CCM has to do with imparting Creative Confidence in visitors, and is one of the major goals of Educators at CCM.  This means instilling in people the freedom and courage to take risk without fear of failure, judgement, constraints, or a need for “perfection.”  It is confidence in the knowledge that every idea you create has value.  CCM challenges visitors to discover new materials and tools, see things in new ways, make connections, take risks, and collaborate with each other in order to create something new and exciting.

The Creative process at CCM is also facilitated by Imagination Starters, which are provided in many of the exhibit spaces.  Imagination Starters consist of 20% inspiration, in the form of a prompt, question, or challenge that visitors will provide the other 80% to in order to have a complete product.  This makes getting started on a creative project much more approachable than being confronted with a blank page and a pencil.  For example, in the Music Studio, fill-in lyric sheets (similar to Mad-Libs) help visitors to write their own songs which they can later create music for and perform in front of a green-screen.  Similarly, the Mystery Box Challenge gives people a box full of random objects which must be transformed into a new creation based on a prompt, such as, “build a space suit for a shark.”  These Imagination Starters are a great way to get creative juices flowing and make being creative less intimidating to people who have told themselves they are incapable.

Once a visitor of CCM has Imagined new possibilities and transformed some of those ideas into tangible Creations, they are encouraged to Share their masterpieces with others.  Every visitor receives validation of their ideas, positive feedback, and ideas for building upon what they have done to make another great project in the future.  Whenever possible, visitor creations are displayed in miniature film festivals, frames on the museum’s walls, on CCM’s website, and in take-home formats, such as a DVD copy or emailed link to their project.  This sharing of visitors’ ideas is an important way to make each person feel validated in their creative abilities and confidant to make something else in the future.

By the end of a day spent at Children’s Creativity Museum visitors will come to accept that they are in fact extremely creative.  Sometimes they might just need a little guidance, in the form of CCM’s supportive environment to help them realize it.  Being allowed and encouraged to Imagine, Confidently Create, Share with others, and to be given the first 20% to get started can go a very long way in reviving a creative spark that has almost gone out.  We hope that you will pay a visit to CCM and learn that YOU are creative too!

Defining Creative Confidence

Defining Creative Confidence

-By Ben Grossman-Kahn

Creative Confidence is a term that gets tossed around a lot at our museum. David Kelley, of IDEO fame, mentions the term frequently, and building creative confidence is one of the guiding objectives of the Stanford d.School.  We have adopted this mantra and integrated it into our educational approach and design process of “Imagine, Create, Share”, and until recently have felt pretty confident that we were imparting the skills and coaching needed to be creatively confident.

However, during a recent education team meeting, one of our interns asked what exactly we meant by creative confidence, pointing out that it was hard to measure unless we knew what such confidence actually looks like.

This prompted some deep soul searching among the Education team and prompted us to utilize the backwards design approach.  We began by trying to define the enduring understandings we want to impart and asked ourselves, how do we define creative confidence, how do we make sure we are teaching it, and how might we recognize it when we see it?  Falling back on our own design process, we began with interviews to understand how others interpreted this phrase, and asked our office staff, interns and high school CITY Guides “What would be your definition of having creative confidence?”  Some of the responses were:

“Knowing that your creative contributions and ideas are valuable”

“Creative confidence can be obtained when you try something you’ve never done and learn something new about yourself from that attempt”

“The confidence to put yourself out on a limb”

“Knowing that you don’t have to find the one right answer”

“Knowing there there is not a single right answer to a problem, and feeling empowered to create and test out multiple solutions.”

“Not being afraid of your imagination.”

“Being able to create anything and feel happy about it.  Not hesitating to build whatever comes to mind”.

“The confidence to trust your instincts and share your ideas with a group”

As designers, we took these statements and looked for patterns and themes that we could synthesize into one clear statement.  Two themes that recurred were the confidence to share your ideas with others and the knowledge that there is always something that can be learned from creating or expressing an idea, even if it doesn’t turn out the way you imagined it would.  With these in mind, we crafted the following definition

Creative Confidence:  Having the freedom and courage to fail/take creative risks and the knowledge that all of the ideas you create have value.

Once we had defined this statement, we were able to pull back and look at our programs and the way we facilitate them and ask ourselves whether we were truly imparting this knowledge and confidence to our visitors.  The question we asked ourselves was “When and how are we explicitly letting our visitors know that it is ok to take creative risks and try new things? What are we doing that would let them know that their ideas have value?”  The results? We realized that we encourage creative confidence in very subtle ways that don’t always resonate with visitors.  We have educational signage with “creative tips” which encourage visitors to experiment with different tools or build a castle out of foam blocks,but a recent observation showed that few visitors seem to engage with these prompts.  With regards to validating the value of what our visitors create we are doing slightly better, with our Creativity Stories project that celebrates the stories behind projects, but once again the percentage of visitors who interact with this experience is smaller than we’d like.

After much internal discussion, we realized that the single best way for us to communicate these values to our visitors is through our facilitation and personal interactions with visitors.  We conducted another brainstorm, this time with our high school City Guides, to develop things we could do or say to inspire this confidence.   Here are 3 concrete tips to try at home:

There is no wrong way to approach a project:  Everyone has a different process for tackling creative projects- some start with sketches or a brainstorm, while others observe their environment for cues and inspiration.  Some may find it helpful to develop a process that can be repeated while for others, finding inspiration might take a different path every time.  We often develop mental blocks or construct artificial rules and constraints for ourselves, such as assuming that we can only use the materials we are given (a cardboard box for example) or that we can only use the materials as they were originally intended (i.e selling the box for $2 to buy new materials would be ‘cheating’).  The next time you find yourself or a child asking questions that begin with “Am I allowed to..” or “Can I do…”  affirm that the answer is always YES.

Take pictures and document/celebrate the process:  There has long been a sense that only the best works of art or creations are worthy of being framed, hung on the mantle or displayed for all to see.  How often have you walked into a room to see a display of blurry photos, or a smudged painting left half- finished?  However, the story behind those beautiful objects lies within those very same ‘mistakes’, and should be celebrated as well.  The Reggio Emilia school system does an incredible job of documenting conversations and artwork from their 3-5 year old students, and displaying these documents prominently on the walls.  This display and celebration of the thought process and artwork of children is an incredibly empowering model and one that we strive to emulate.  The responses we get from kids when we ask if we can take pictures of their prototypes and creations to share with other kids on Facebook and our blog is priceless- huge smiles, a surge in confidence and a feeling that their work is special and worth celebrating, no matter what it looks like.

At the end of a project, ask what you’ve learned and how you could do things differently the next time.  There has been a lot of talk in the business world recently about the importance and power of failure.  One of the key ideas that has emerged from this discussion is the idea of “Failing Forward”, or using lessons learned from an experience to drive forward your next iteration.  There is a huge difference between blindly accepting failure and plowing forward and actively reflecting after each project on what worked, what didn’t work and what you would do differently the next time.  A recent school group was working on a claymation movie- unfortunately their computer crashed three times during the filming process.  By the third time around, the students knew exactly how to get started without any support and were much more sophisticated in their approach.  Had they not been forced to pause and reflect on their process in between reboots, their final product would have been much more choppy and confusing.  At the end of each project, leave time to debrief on “I liked..”  “I wish..” and “What if…”.  By capturing these lessons learned, you are calling out the fact that all of the ideas created had value in that they offered valuable lessons and learnings for future projects.

With that in mind, we now end our daily meetings with one very important question for all of our staff:

“What did you do today that would explicitly let a visitor know it is ok to take creative risks and that the idea/project they created has value?”

How do you or your organization define creative confidence? How do you foster it?  Share with us! (And know that all ideas you share are valuable and will teach us something new)

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Taking Creative Risks and Failing Forward

By Ben Grossman-Kahn

One of our favorite mantras within the Education department is “Failing forward”. This phrase captures a key creativity lesson- most of us don’t have perfect ideas the first time around. In fact, what we frequently find is that the best ideas come out of our ‘spectacular failures’. James Dyson, the billionaire inventor of the Dyson vacuum, famously spent over ten years and developed 5126 prototypes before achieving financial success with his Cyclone vacuum. Since then, he has gone on to found the Dyson Foundation to encourage design and engineering education. He describes the power of failure below

“…The foundation encourages kids to fail. Or rather, not be afraid to fail: to experiment, test ideas and make something new. Students need an alternative to read-and-repeat. They need to use their heads and hands to identify problems and go about solving them. Taking things apart and developing new ways to do things. Not to be mistaken for playtime, it’s how children develop critical thinking skills and the practical knowledge for how things work. And it’s fun. “

– James Dyson “In Praise of Failure” (Wired UK)

This summer, we ran a workshop for teachers called “Camp WooHoo” that introduced the growth mindset theory made famous by Carol Dweck. During the workshops, we encouraged teachers to explore their own comfort with taking various types of risks- social, professional, artistic. During the debriefings, many teachers expressed the discomfort they felt when they were pressured to produce a perfectly drawn picture, or to follow instructions perfectly. Others talked about the importance of having time to make mistakes and explore the programs they were working with.

As we talked about how these same pressures might be felt by students in a classroom, it became clear that all too often we put these expectations of perfection on activities and assignments. When leading a writers workshop, for example, are you making it clear to students that early drafts are an opportunity to try out different plot ideas and take creative risks? When you introduce a new program or digital tool to students, are you giving them time to play and explore in an open ended fashion before expecting them to complete assignments using those new tools? Woodside Priory, a private secondary school, has made a school wide commitment to “Fail Forward Fridays” once a month, where teachers, students and administrators try out new curriculum, furniture arrangements or lesson plans. Just as valuable as the experiments themselves are the debrief discussions and lessons learned that emerge from these days- we would argue that there is a key distinction between merely failing and ‘failing forward’.

Share your strategies for encouraging risk taking and failing forward in the comments below, then check out these amazing videos of creative legends discussing failure.