Creativity: Stages of Creative Process

What is Creativity?

Creativity represents a Special Kind of Thinking Process. Creativity is generally known as originality in ideas. Every one of us ought to process creative abilities. But every one of us is a unique creation, Thereby the degree of possession of creative ability is not uniform.

Some of us are found to possess high creative talents and these are the people who move the world ahead by their discoveries and inventions in the field of art, literature, science, business, teaching and other fields of human accomplishments. They are responsible for coming up with new ideas and bringing about social and cultural changes.

Creativity Meaning in Hindi

रचनात्मकता (Creativity) is Something new and value is formed with their original and novel idea

Meaning and Definition of Creativity

The Term ‘Creativity’ or ‘Creative process’ has been defined by different educationists and philosophers these are-

Stagner and Karwoski

According to him- Creativity implies the production of a ‘totally or partially’ novel identity.

Drevdahl

Creativity is the capacity of a person to produce compositions, products or ideas which are essentially new or novel and previously unknown to the producer

Wilson, Guilford and Christensen

The creative process is any process by which something new is produced-an idea or an object including a new form or arrangement of old elements. The new creation must contribute to the solution of some problem.

Skinner

Creative thinking means that the predictions or inferences for the individual are new, original, ingenious, unusual. The creative thinker is one who explores new areas and makes new observations, new predictions, new inferences.

We can conclude from the above definition that the creation or discovery of something new is the central element in all these definitions. Therefore, creativity is the capacity or ability of an individual to create, discover or produce a new idea or object including the re-arrangement or reshaping of what is already known to him.

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Nature and characteristics of creativity

The nature and characteristics of creativity are as follows:-

  • Creativity is universal. Every one of us possesses the creative capacity to some degree.
  • Creative abilities are natural endowments, they are capable of being nourished and nurtured by training or education.
  • Through creative expression, something new or novel idea is produced. But the novelty or newness doesn’t mean to produce totally new idea it may be something that is already present but reshaped or rearrangement of these ideas is also called creativity.
  • Creative expression is the source of joy and satisfaction for the creator.
  • Ego involvement in creative person like creator can say it’s my creation, I have solved this problem
  • Creative thinking cannot be closed thinking. It must have complete freedom for the multiplicity of responses, choices and line of action.
  • The field of creative expression is very wide. It covers all the aspects of human accomplishments like scientific inventions and discoveries, compositions of poems, Drama, dance, music etc. Our day to day life activities also needs creativity. Therefore, in a nutshell, life as a whole presents enormous opportunities for creative expression.

Stages of Creativity Process

There are five stages of the creative process these are-Preparation, Incubation, Insight, Evaluation and Elaboration.

Preparation

The first stage is the idea of ‘preparation’ the idea that is immersing yourself in the domain. If someone is good at music then he will absorb a lot of music that is inspiring him to create a new piece of music.

Likewise, some who is good at dance, arts, Research will look after to create something new in their interested and related field. In this stage, students try to absorb as much information as possible because this information will go into their subconsciousness where it is very important for the second stage.

Incubation

The second stage is called the ‘incubation’ stage. In incubation, all the information he has gathered in the first stage preparation stage really goes back. It starts to churn in the back of his mind, in the sub-consciousness. This is an extremely important stage because something can take days, or week or months or sometimes even years.

That idea that he will think about writing about a book or piece of music, and he is writing about it and he just leave it to the side for a while and then come back to it. Now the interesting thing about the incubation stages is that to a certain extent it is not really under his control how long that stage will take. It is something he cannot really rush because what it leads to is the third stage.

Insight

The third stage is a classic signal or sign of a creative person, which is called the Insight stage. With insight, it is really the idea of the ‘Aha’ moment, the ‘Eureka’ moment. Although it is probably the smallest part of the five steps, it is possible one of the most important parts.

They most often happen when they are doing some kind of low-level physical activity; going for a shower, driving a car, having a walk. This is because his subconsciousness in the previous stages is bubbling away and this insight stage really allows the mind to work on something else. And then bring these ideas to the forefront of his mind. So that’s the third stage, the insight’s stage.

Evaluation

The fourth stage is the idea of Evaluation. It is an area where lots of creative people struggle because often he has so many ideas and he has a limited amount of time.

So the evaluation stage is most important because there is where it requires self-criticism and reflection. It is asking yourself questions like “Is this a novel or new idea or is it one that is just re-hashed and has been done before?”

It is very important because we have only a limited amount of time to do certain things. Often we found that people who are called the most creative people are often very good at this stage. They have all ideas but can use self-criticism and reflection to say “these are the ones that have the most merit and that I am going to work on”.

Elaboration

The final stage of the creative process is Elaboration. This is the stage where they actually doing the work. So many people out there think that the creative process is that insight or the preparation part. But really a creative individual is not complete unless they can go through that and actually put in the hard work.

The elaboration; testing the idea, working on the idea, working at your desk, those hours in the laboratory if you are a scientist, those days testing and micro-testing products. This is the elaboration stage.

Conclusion

Creativity is the most significant concept for human development. The creative child is an asset to society as well as to the nation. Therefore, for the development of society, creativity stands out as an activity to ve studied, cherished and cultivated. Thus, it requires wholehearted support from parents, teachers and society for the survival and growth of the nation in an effective manner. Therefore, it should be ensured that children are provided with adequate educational facilities

References

Essential of Educational psychology By S.K Mangal

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