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Herbert Walberg (1969) equated creativity with
the winning of awards, prizes, or other recognition
in competition. As it takes an interest in external
effects or responses through the use of behavioral
objectives, this attitude could be called a little bit
Skinnerian. According to Victor Lowenfeld (1947)
and then Lowenfeld & Brittain (1987) creativity is
closely related to thinking abilities and to attitude
development, and may have little to do with the
processes of the intellect.
According to the Discipline Based Art Educa-
tion (DBAE) program that was developed in the
sixties at the J. Paul Getty Center for Education
in the Arts (Dobbs, 1992) creativity has been
conceived as “unconventional behavior that oc-
curs as conventional understandings are attained”
(Lipari, 1988, p.15). Many operational definitions
of creativity focused attention on an internal
mental process of creating knowledge and implied
attributes of novelty and value recognized by ex-
perts and the general society (Bloom, Hastings,
& Madaus, 1971). Elisa Giaccardi & Gerhard
Fischer (2008) extend the traditional notion of
design to include co-adaptive processes between
users and systems that enable the users to act as
designers in personally meaningful activities and
be creative. But some recognized creators and art-
ists merely recombine known bits of information.
Manipulation of the paintings of great masters
using computer-generated programs (Schwartz,
1985; Schwartz & Schwartz, 1992) could pos-
sibly serve as an example of this meaning of the
notion of creativity.
Definition of creativity as communication of
emotional genuineness can be found in the clas-
sification of art students that was made by the
university art teachers (Hammer, 1984). They
distinguished between facility and creativity, the
facility being a sterile technique: the ability to paint
or draw with ease but in unoriginal, stereotyped
forms and colors, while creativity being a real
feeling demonstrating (with or without facility)
exquisitely sensitive powers of color, tone, form,
and discrimination combined with personal imagi-
native expressiveness and an original approach.
Thus creativity emphasizes visual and emotional
authenticity, and is considered a process of calling
forth inner emotions to put on canvas. In an early
study on computer-based instruction Marianne
Rash (1988) pointed at another feature of creative
thinking that could be defined as functioning of
metacognitive strategies in knowledge acquisition
processes: not only creating ideas, but also defining
the means by which these ideas could be judged.
The creation of the criteria that could be used to
determine the possible effectiveness of the solution
appeared to be integral to the cognitive process of
creativity (Tennyson, Thurlow, & Breuer, 1987).
Figure 1 presents a work created by the student
from my “Introduction to Visual Communication
Design” course. The artist paid homage to the
inventor of a Polaroid camera (created in 1947) by
collecting pictures of devices that he considered
redeemable by one Polaroid camera: photographic
cameras from 1947, projectors from 1960, 1977,
and a copier from 2009; with this visual shortcut
the artist signified the importance of the Edwin
Land's invention.
Figure 1. Spencer Korey Duncan, Design for a
coin commemorating Edwin Land, inventor of a
Polaroid camera (© S. K. Duncan, 2012. Used
with permission)
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