Plenitude. Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff by Rich Gold

Author:Rich Gold [Rich Gold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: aVe4EvA
Published: 2007-05-18T20:00:00+00:00

I have had a life I’m not allowed to complain about. I’ve made lots of different kinds of stuff. Some successful, some not. Some really cool, some, well, let’s just say, prosaic. It has been interesting. Far from complaining about it, I have begun to speak about it, going to companies and conferences giving talks on “innovation” and “creativity,” which are just ways of saying “let’s make more stuff.” And that brings me, finally, to “The Plenitude” itself.

Creative and innovative are not words that I would have chosen myself to describe my life, but the culture has settled in on them. They seem like good things, fundamental to the running of the culture and to the success of the planet. But what is this thing called creativity? What does is it mean? At its core, I maintain, it simply means making stuff that has never been made before, that nobody has even thought of before and is not a warmed over replica of something already made. Now clearly I don’t mean that the stuff has to be physical. It could be an idea, or a concept, or a string of words. But a lot of stuff is physical stuff, particularly in our world. Physical objects in our culture are like words in other cultures.

And just as clearly there are hierarchies of creativity, both personally and culturally. We often say something is more creative than something else, or that this thing is more innovative than that thing. That is, it is farther away from something that already exists—it is less of a copy. To be not creative is to “think inside the box”—to think of stuff that has already exists. In our culture of creativity we want the new, the different, the revolutionary. The boxes on the supermarket shelves visually squeal NEW NEW NEW.

But there is another meaning of the word creative that also has a qualitative connotation: It’s not just something that has never been before, but it is something good, or useful, or communicative, or impressive, or beautiful and that a few people would buy for large amounts of money or that lots of people would buy for a small amount. Creative is a child when he or she draws a picture with purple crayon and, in a different (though related) sense of creative, when a scientist creates an unexpected equation or an artist produces a new and wondrous work. From the child’s drawing to the painter’s canvas is a continuum that it allows entirely new forms, new genres, of stuff to come into existence.

There are cultures where telling stories means retelling the same story that your parents told you. The power of the story, in fact, comes from the retelling of it over and over again. In its consistency, its sameness, it provides the eternal. In our culture, this is called copyright infringement and you can be fined or even sent to jail. Each story must be new and different. In some cases you cannot even reference an

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.