Understanding creativity

Attitude
Knowledge
Imagination
Habitat
Resources
Culture

In seeligs innovation model you can see that attitude, knowledge and imagination overlap. This is because these three parts of the engine are intermal and come from inside you - they are inside the mind and perhaps nobody else can influence them.

On the other hand, culture, habitat and resources are of the outside world. Although these do influence the process of imagination transforming knowledge into ideas, I do believe that all six of these engines are essential for creative problem solving, along with confidence.

Attitude is an important engine because turning ideas into reality is never straight forward. It definitely requires motivation and drive. It is important for the individual to be able to motivate themselves and again, comes with confidence.

Seelig believes that knowledge is seen to be fuel for the imagination, without knowledge the imagination won’t be fantastic. For me, imagination is how we connect and combine ideas, they could be seen as puzzle builders for some people. Seelig believes that to be creative you must have a depth of knowledge as a starting point. When I’m working on some art work and I come to a hurdle, I have to build upon my knowledge and provide myself with tools to overcome the problem. This could be the case with anything. You then pay attention and know for next time – the more we know, the more resources we have.

Knowledge is parallel to resources in the model because according to Seelig, a person’s knowledge depends upon their resources. If you have loads of resources your knowledge will be greater and if you don’t have much knowledge, this is because you don’t have many resources? She says that the more you know about a certain thing then the more likely you are to get funding. She says “It’s really important to look at the interrelationship of all these pieces and not look at them in isolation.”

On the other hand, Habitat is outside of imagination and not parallel to it. This is because ‘’habitat is the externalization of imagination’’, according to Seelig. We have to imagine certain environments first, before stimulating our imagination. I do believe that the environment affects the way we think. Does this mean that the types of environment we build, effects our imagination? This could be true for knowledge and resources as well.

I believe that resources should be viewed more broadly to include time, people etc. This is because I think people tend just to associate resources with money and materialistic things.

Seelig believes that creativity can be taught but I believe that we are all naturally creative. We are all creative as we respond and communicate to the world around us / to our environment. She says ''Interacting with the world requires creative problem solving every day''.

Every sentence we say is unique, our brain thinks about every single thing we say and every action we make. The environment and our culture could be a problem because these have been squashed - Seelig believes that our education system is to blame for this and I would agree with her because at school we are brought up to believe there is only one right answer and schools also favour multiple choice tests, where again, there can only be one right answer.In school I sometimes felt under pressure - especially in front of the class because we were often forced to memorize facts and figures. We were never pushed to think outside the box, and were scared of being wrong.