What is Creativity?

The next week of this phase they call a sprint will focus on exploring Creativity, what exactly it is and how we use it in our practice. The end goals of this week are to:

  1. Explain what we mean by the term ‘creativity’.
  2. Apply creative problem-solving in your practice.
  3. Describe and practise various methods to foster your creativity.

I have had a browse through the pages of this week on Canvas (Flex.falmouth.ac.uk,. 2021) and there has already been a lot of discussion about how people generate creative ideas and how what people do to generate creative ideas.

From what I can see, the overall theme of this section is exploring what is creativity, what it means to be creative and how do we use creativity to generate ideas to solve problems. This section seems to be broken up into a few distinct areas, as follows:

  • What is meant by creativity
  • Methods for ‘ideation’, i.e. coming up with ideas
  • Computational creativity, i.e. the use of technology in the creative process
  • Weekly Challenge: Applying these methods of creativity by modifying and existing piece of work

In intend to do the reading provided on Canvas to gain an understanding of what it means to be creative and in particular, to learn the skills and tools to develop my idea and apply them to solve problems. I will consider numerous methods for generating ideas and I will assess their usefulness as far as the Weekly Challenge goes, as well as their applicability within my practice.

As I progress, I will attempt to apply these methods to my own work and then I will undertake the Weekly Challenge, which is to take an existing artefact of someone else’s creativity and remediate it using the methods that I have studied.

Concurrent to this, I am also trying to teach myself C# as this is the language used in Unity. I have often struggled to learn C# as I have found learning to code difficult and I think it has definitely been a block to me trying to learn to make games in the past. When I have made games before, I have largely relied on tutorials to do this, which meant that I would simply parrot the code that was being written but not absorb it.

While I don’t envision I will ever specialise in scripting, I recognise its importance and that it a working knowledge is required in order to thrive in this field. When learning it, I will remember that I am it serves to provide a framework with which I can be creative. I have used coding to realise creativity before as I know HTML and CSS, as I have built websites for clients before and I use it a lot in my day job. I am trying to learn the basics of C# to achieve a similar sort of goal, which is that if I learn the basics, I can use these as a means to realise my creativity when building different games.

I will need to remember that I am not learning C# isolation but that it is a core skill that I am looking to develop and explore. Along with studying the roots of C#, I am looking to make a very basic game project so that I can understand practically how it works. This will definitely take me about of my comfort zone, but I am hoping it will help me to push my creativity and use it in ways that I have not done so before. I may make many errors while doing this, but at least I will have challenged myself.

Perhaps, as part of this week, I will attempt to integrate my own personal study of C# into this and analyse it to work out what role it will serve in applying creative solutions to problems.

References

Flex.falmouth.ac.uk. 2021. Week 2: Introduction. [online] Available at: <https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/911/pages/week-2-introduction?module_item_id=49141> [Accessed 1 February 2021].

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