Rapid Creativity
The Ideal and The Real
To be creative is to bring an idea into the world as a creative work.
How exactly one should go about bringing forth creative work, which lives up to the idea envisioned in the mind, can be unclear. Doing creative work is hard. But the creative idea, as it exists in the mind, must interact with the real world if the idea is to turn into an artefact. Something that’s made by your own hands.
People who make things, who are creative, and who love being creative for its own ends, have devised solutions for how the ideal and the real world can interplay. Techniques such as brainstorming, drafting, sketching, concept-making, and demoing, are a means for linking the ideal and the real together. These techniques form a bridge, so that ideas, so to speak, can walk down in order to take on a shape through a worldly material object.
Rapid Prototyping
In the beginning of the creative process there’s the blank form. It’s where you meet the blank canvas, the grid paper, or the blinking cursor awaiting input. Once you have your idea down and you’ve given the blank form something you can work with, it is a prototype that can be further moulded, improved, and made good enough. The prototype can be checked against the vision of it that exists in your mind. If it’s not good enough, improve it, and check it again. To move through this process is to rapidly prototype your creative work.
Rapidly moving through improved versions of your prototype is a means of getting close to the ideal. The ideal cannot be reached, since it is an abstract form, but perfect is never the aim. A good enough prototype made with least effort is the aim. Once accomplished, a good enough prototype can be made better.
Selecting and Improving Prototypes
One method for how to improve your creative prototypes is to use what nature uses: selection. Animals undergo evolution by means of natural selection, and the same can be consciously applied to prototypes. Select the best prototype for improvement, check it against the ideal version that exists in your mind, improve it, get feedback if applicable, and repeat the process.
Selecting the best prototype for improvement and implementation partly rests on prior knowledge, partly on thinking and looking, and partly on intuition. Prior knowledge is the accumulated knowledge and skills one already has and relies on. Thinking and looking is to make a conscious choice to really see and think about what needs improving. Intuition is our remarkable gut feeling, and can act as a means of generating immediate insight about which prototype to select and how to make improvements.
Unlike the natural world, we don’t have aeons of time to mould and shape things that we make. Rapidly prototyping ideas, coupled with the cognitive tools available to us, is a means for getting ideas out quickly, selecting the best one, and altering it in line with the vision that we have in our mind to bring forth a creative work that we’re happy with.