Creativity School: Learn, Make, Share

By Oğuzhan Aygören - Assistant Professor of Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Boğazici University; Faculty Innovation Fellows candidate

The formal education system makes us rely on analytical thinking and puts limits on what we know and achieve. However, as Einstein has famously said: “Logic takes us from A to B, but imagination takes us to anywhere.” Instead of knowing, we should focus more on learning. A wise man knows he knows nothing yet, a layman knows everything. So, the Creativity School project aims to nurture the creativity skills of individuals. While doing that, creative thinking and teaching methods are applied by a diverse range of instructors including students and professors. Also, these methods are embedded in multidisciplinary courses with diverse participants in any subject. Teaching itself becomes creative where the chakras of participants open and they unleash the preexisting limits on their creativity.

Almost all people, even the most educated ones, talk from memory with preexisting statements in line with their beliefs. So, the only thing that separates educated and uneducated minds is mostly memorization of different arguments. Producing original ideas and owning those is a rare occasion. At the same time, it is an act of courage and confidence. People are afraid of creative thinking. Forget about execution of creativity, they are even afraid of thinking. Afraid of losing their beliefs, afraid of getting lost in real life, afraid of authority not giving permission. However, the most important tool of advancement and improvement is ideas, products and actions that are independent from the existing order and mostly contrary to the status quo. Therefore, creativity, imagination and inspiration are both exciting and frightening. It needs guts to do those. Like an artist. Indeed, creativity is a skill that needs to be learned from artists. In the school and education system, creativity has a very limited area. Unfortunately, this leads people who go through the formal education lathe to become more mechanical and more angular.

Creativity starts with dreaming, wondering, questioning, understanding, empathizing and learning. Then, the execution stage is quite analytical. Like an artist who knows in what ratios to use the colors with which brush strokes. In that sense, the artist is also like the chemist. She measures, experiments, fails, learns, tries. Or she is like a physicist who knows how hard to hit the canvas with which brush and how long the brush stroke should last. However, what distinguishes the artist from the physicist or chemist is not only knowing how the mechanisms work but also adding beauty, aesthetics, form and soul. That’s why the design thinking mindset is becoming more popular within business and engineering communities. Today, it is not enough to produce and sell a product. It is expected to be beautiful, smart, aesthetic and create a “wow”. The way to do that is both understanding and observing the outside world and also heading towards one’s inside world to combine logic with feelings and emotions.

The world has become more uncertain, volatile, ambiguous and complex than before. Knowledge and knowing used to be the most important, but today, constant, fast learning is important. Because we admit that we can not know more than Google.

Now, it is time for wisdom in this information noise and clutter. Wisdom is about identifying, filtering and combining the relevant knowledge. So, it is imperative to produce novel and creative works and ideas. The business world is trying to increase productivity by 10%, 20%, 30% with industrialization. However, the entrepreneurship and innovation world is aiming to disrupt everything by 10 times, 20 times, 30 times by resetting what we know and searching for the quest of the ideal final result. If not for a wild idea, Bitcoin, iPhone or Cybertruck would not even have been possible. This is the freedom to think in terms of moonshots and this is what moves us forward and onward.

When we give everyone the exact same education, it is normal that the output is similar. However, the leaders and the pioneers in the society are the people who find, become aware of and improve themselves like plants that grow in impossible places. What if we give everyone the chance to be like those plants? What if we provide the means and tools for everyone to be free and unique? What if we provide more opportunity and facility for improvement?

Our creativity school project is open to everyone who is aware of his/her own moulds and would like to step up to change that. It welcomes people from all ages, all disciplines and all professions. Even, the more diversity, the better it is. Creativity school is not an alternative to the existing school curriculum. On the contrary, it is like a complementary layer which improves underutilized creativity skills.

In the creativity school, classes have 12 participants. Each participant is at a different age with a different background. Teams are composed of people from students in different departments and alumni from different professions. These teams are given challenges to improve their skills in learning, making and sharing. In addition to challenges, they get some core and elective courses like in a minor program. The program might include learning skills of observation, asking good questions, experimentation, researching and courses like behavioral economics, game theory and logic. Those courses and skills already exist in the university. We just need to extract it out and re-frame what we have for creating a wild output. For each course, the important thing is producing exercises and projects which help to improve creative thinking skills. In addition, artists are also invited and asked to share their experience, intuition and creative wisdom. It would be really amazing to combine the participants with impressive and inspiring people.

These courses and exercises can also be online as well. For that purpose, each team needs a mentor who closely monitors and communicates. In terms of physical space, it would be fun and playful to have a spacious building with tall ceilings. The place should also encourage wild ideas and allow experimentation.

Why should creativity school be of any interest to participants and the university?

Many people are so busy. They work a lot yet they do not produce anything. The way to produce unique and meaningful work beyond being busy requires a mindset outside of regular, normal and widely accepted. Although many people think about those, they do not have the courage to question and produce because of the fear and lack of confidence. Creativity school will give confidence to individuals questioning the fundamental assumptions and finding novel ways of thinking. So, it could be possible to embrace moonshot thinking and come up with something ten times better than existing beyond improving it.