A different look at creativity

In pre­vi­ous arti­cles I dis­cussed some of the broader issues and ben­e­fits related to Social Media/Networking and how this new tool could ben­e­fit artists. The first arti­cle “What’s up with Social media” I intro­duced the con­cept of “ambi­ent inti­macy” and how the growth of social net­work­ing via the Inter­net has increased our abil­ity to build rela­tion­ships with our buy­ers. In “How to use Social Media” I talked about how social media gives us the abil­ity to engage our buy­ers, build rela­tion­ships with them and even­tu­ally develop a tribe orga­nized around our art and our values.

This series takes the Social Media exam­i­na­tion a lit­tle deeper by exam­in­ing who can ben­e­fit the most from social media and what tools are most applic­a­ble. And more specif­i­cally how each seg­ment of the gen­er­al­ized label of cre­ativ­ity can ben­e­fit most from Social Media.

A recent post by Mark McGuin­ness  on the Lat­eral Action blog describ­ing the best 10 social net­work­ing sites for cre­atives also car­ried an under­ly­ing theme…collaboration, inter­ac­tion and feed­back are impor­tant to the cre­ative process. The under­ly­ing premise is sim­i­lar to one I have argued about here…the elim­i­na­tion of geog­ra­phy, time and other bar­ri­ers by the inter­net and most recently by the evo­lu­tion of Social Media has  made col­lab­o­ra­tive tools avail­able we could barely imag­ine even 10 years ago. That said, read­ing Mark’s post brought up some ques­tions and issues I have been chew­ing on for a while.

The two ques­tions came to mind:

• Why are artists either resis­tant or slow to use new meth­ods of reach­ing their markets?
• Who is using the methods?

As I skimmed  Mark’s inter­views I noticed two things:

• The pri­mary users espe­cially of the hard core social net­work sites (focused on pro­vid­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment) were really true cre­atives and not nec­es­sar­ily defin­ing them­selves through the tra­di­tional def­i­n­i­tion of art.
• The sec­ond thing was that I noticed I had been dump­ing any­thing and every­thing how­ever remote that involved cre­at­ing art into the CREATIVE hopper.

My ah ah moment was see­ing that not all art is cre­ative and not all cre­atives are artists!! Well, you might say DUH!! …but I think quite a lot of peo­ple make the same mis­take. Dump­ing every­thing into the same pot with­out dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion cre­ates a lot of con­fu­sion and a sense of cul­tural dis­ori­en­ta­tion. We have no cri­te­ria to orga­nize, no boxes to slip things into all the while scratch­ing our col­lec­tive heads over the obvi­ous  dif­fer­ences we do see within the cre­ative community.

So I noticed that I felt a com­mon bond, a like mind­ed­ness with those fre­quent­ing the more hard core net­works. I could feel the excite­ment of cre­ative juices. A frame of ref­er­ence started to emerge …instead of a hop­per of cre­ativ­ity maybe we need to look at it as a spec­trum with dif­fer­ent shades or lev­els each fad­ing into the other. For sim­plic­ity sake I defined the spec­trum as con­sist­ing of: Cre­ators, Mak­ers and Pro­duc­ers. This seemed to explain for me why I for exam­ple thrive on cre­ative inter­ac­tion and often feel lost with­out it while oth­ers tend to keep them­selves iso­lated. So let’s take a closer look at these parts of the cre­ative spec­trum. The graphic below is sort of an abstract rep­re­sen­ta­tion of how I see the spec­trum, there is no sig­nif­i­cance to the size or color of each section…just in case you were wondering.

Cre­ators

Cre­ators are the orig­i­nal thinkers, the mash­ers who see pos­si­bil­i­ties in everything.

• They were born with a vision of their world or they have dis­cov­ered their unique world view as they matured.
• They also seem to be nat­u­rally drawn to one or more medi­ums for com­mu­ni­cat­ing that vision and most impor­tantly they gen­er­ally seem thrive in inter­ac­tive envi­ron­ments where they can explore the edges of their visions.
• They are the inven­tors, the early adapters the exper­i­menters… fear of the unknown is not some­thing they are famil­iar with.
• They tend to oper­ate in a conceptual/theoretical world.

While admit­tedly there is a great deal of over­lap pos­si­ble here, those in the cre­ator hue of the spec­trum are not nec­es­sar­ily good at trans­lat­ing their con­cepts into reality.

Mak­ers

That role of trans­la­tor is given over to…The Mak­ers. The over­lap area between the pure cre­ators and the  pure mak­ers is the home of those who can strad­dle both worlds, they are the ones who under­stand the con­cepts clear enough to shape them into real­ity, they give the con­cepts form and process.

The pure mak­ers are the ones who can take the recipe and adapt it within the con­text of their cre­ative medium.

• They develop new ways to throw a par­tic­u­lar  type of porce­lain clay, or use a par­tic­u­lar type of paint­ing sur­face, or write a vari­a­tion of a given code.
• They tend to be medium spe­cific, devel­op­ing a point of view or voice that shapes the tech­niques they develop and once set their style gen­er­ally does not vary.
• These are the fine crafts peo­ple, who are not so much focused on pro­duc­tion of a com­mod­ity as they are on giv­ing form to their voice.
• They fre­quently refine  con­cepts devel­oped by cre­ators, into an array of tech­niques for work­ing in their medium.

As mak­ers move closer to focus­ing on pro­duc­tion they slowly become..Producers.

Pro­duc­ers

Pro­duc­ers work from recipes and tem­plates to pro­duce a spe­cific line of prod­uct in the cre­ative spec­trum they are the fac­tory focused on num­bers and repli­ca­tion. Pro­duc­ers are the arti­sans of the spec­trum and also the dis­trib­u­tors they bring the efforts of the cre­ators and the mak­ers to the ordi­nary con­sumer. In a sense their work is util­i­tar­ian it takes the maker’s pot off the man­tel or book­shelf and places it on the table for every­day use.

Ques­tions

• So where do you fall on  the cre­tive spectrum?
• Do these gen­er­al­ized cat­e­gories work?
• How does each cat­e­gory inter­act best with social media?

Part 2 of this series will look at just how each part of the Cre­ative Spec­trum can use social media and what parts of social media work best with each of the three cre­ative spec­trum categories.

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