In our second week of study we were asked to shift our focus to creativity. I felt somewhat uncomfortable at this because despite working in creative industries all my adult life I don’t really consider myself as creative. I often look at the work of others in awe, wishing I were talented enough to produce something as amazing as theirs. Clearly this week was going to be spent outside my comfort zone.
For the Spark Forum the task was to think about times when we needed to channel our own creativity and discuss what we did to foster this and did it change the way we see things.
In my own answer I considered both my life as an R&D engineer and a photographer. I’d never really looked at my accomplishments like this nor together before. Whilst I was proud of what I’d achieved each time, looking at them critically in this manner made them feel much less impressive. All five of the solutions I presented were built on the same underlying theme: the application of tried and tested techniques I’d used many times before. Suddenly there was no creativity there. I didn’t invent the techniques I’d used, I just learned them as indeed anybody could. All I’d done was to select them from my toolbox of techniques and apply them. Again, this was something I felt anyone could do and with a little logical and structured thinking would arrive at the same solution as me.
Yet people have often remarked on the creativity of some of my solutions. I’ve even been featured in magazines and won an industry award for it. So where was it?
Pondering that question, led me to the realisation there was only one place it could exist: the mind of the observer. Imagine my surprise when I learned, not five minutes after publishing that comment and whilst watching Prof. Krzywinska’s presentation, that the French painter, Marcel Duchamp, had presented the exact same notion in 1957 during his lecture, The Creative Act:
‘All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act’
Clearly my earlier thought was incorrect, or rather incomplete. According to Duchamp the observer (spectator) has their own role to play in assessing creativity but so too does the creator and this was the part I was having trouble relating to. Whenever I was faced with a problem that required a creative solution I simply dipped into my ‘Technique Toolbox’ to select the one most appropriate at the time. The decision was always made on the basis of experience, logic and pre-visualisation of the solution itself.
With hindsight I now wonder if I’d thrown away the shackles of logic and experience to step outside my own comfort zone and take more risks, how different could the solutions have been? This was certainly the assertion made by Petty in his book “How to be better at … Creativity” .
What stunts creativity more than any other factor is the common belief that you can best meet challenges, solve problems, and generate new designs by the skilled use of logical thinking.
(Petty, 2017)
This leads me to the first of the two big takeaways from this week’s study, namely:
- ICEDIP Creativity Model
- Computational Creativity
ICEDIP Creativity Model
I’d never heard of Geoffrey Petty or indeed the concept of creativity models until this week, much less believed such a thing could exist.
Having worked in software development for much of my career I’m all too familiar with the complaint from my peers that processes, frameworks and models stifle their creativity. The rationale is they impose constraints, they limit the freedom of the designer to implement a solution. My view has always been different: they allow the designer to direct their focus more towards the solution without needing to reinvent the infrastructure. After all, there will always be constraints within which we need to work.
I do now wonder what my peers would have to say about the ICEDIP model, itself being a model/framework within which a creative can work to provide solutions to problems. I found Petty’s book particularly insightful. Adapting my current workflow to include the 6 phases he describes will be relatively simple. The hard part will be letting go of (some of) the cold, hard logic and building in the more creative aspects such as experimentation, risk taking and lateral, chunking-up thinking.
Computational Creativity
Having watched the three presentations by Prof. Colton several times, this is an area I’d like to delve deeper into. The concept revolves around creating software with the ability to be creative itself through a blend of AI, machine learning and big data. The end game being to develop a system that is deemed to be creative in its own right rather than being an extension of the author’s own creativity.
From a game development perspective the obvious application of such technology would be NPC gameplay mechanics. In the Bethesda Softworks’ title, Fallout 4, the Preston Garvey character is an AI intended to create random encounter content. It’s highly rule and table based and while it makes a reasonable attempt the encounters quickly become annoying and repetitive, serving mainly to slow progress through the game down. This has been my experience of most game AI: learning to predict the AI’s behaviour is usually simple and once known, the game is easy to beat. I really want to challenge this by developing an AI system capable of emergent behaviour, an AI that learns from the player to give each player a unique experience based on their own gameplay style.
Another aspect of computational creativity that I hadn’t previously given much thought to is that of content creation. Here, the AI is designed to create in-game artefacts and buildings, leading up to generating new levels for the player to play through. Extrapolating this idea further, as Prof. Colton says, one could develop a system to create an entire game from scratch. This in turn poses an interesting philosophical question: who would own the IP?
Also, if software were able to create a complete game, what would be the long term effects on the game industry? Could we get to a situation where the software was so good there’s simply no need for game studios?
References
Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash
