Unexpected Media

Buzz in Leicester

Spoke yesterday at a conference on Creativity:Innovation and Industry, organised by the Insititute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University in Leicester. The other contributors were two academics, Professor Margaret Boden and Dr Claudia Eckert, and Toby Moores of Sleepy Dog, the company that brought us Buzz.

Annoyingly I managed to read 8:00 am as 7:00 am on my watch, missed my train and missed Maggie’s opening talk. I’ll post more when I get a transcript but I think she discussed three kinds of creativity: combinational, exploratory and historic. I know she told me that I was wrong when in my presentation I gave the Koestler definition of ‘bisociation‘ as the heart of any creative act.

Claudia Eckhart has been studying creativity and innovation processes at Cambridge University. She compared attitudes to creativity in art and scientific or technical domains, suggesting that the term is regarded with suspicion in engineering projects where there is much more of an emphasis on ‘process excellence’: ‘the more complex the product, the less creativity is discussed’. While I accept that there may be major differences in language and that there isn’t the same emphasis on (or recognition of) the creative individual, I wasn’t at ease with the suggestion that the creative act is somehow different in artistic domains. Maggie Boden may be right in saying that there are more kinds of creativity than the ‘bisociative’, but I think that Koestler’s work did demonstrate that in making new discoveries, innovating and finding original solutions people are essentially doing the same thing no matter the domain in which they are working.

The final speaker was Toby Moores. I’m glad that I went before him because we covered a lot of the same ground: personas, de Bono techniques, having lots of ideas to get one good one, multiple thinking styles.

Wish I’d thought of Buzz, though. What a great franchise.