Arts, Machines, and Creative Education

Introduction

Creative people are fundamental for the survival and progress of human beings. Indeed, may one conceive innovation without creativity?

The previous chapters have underlined that creativity is something more than originality or problem-solving skill. It emerged that creativity is a multifaceted and culturally sensitive notion that is rather difficult to reduce into a simple formula. The standard or bi-partite definition of creativity (Runco & Jaeger, 2012) was the fruit of decades of discussions, but the debate about creativity continues. The standard definition states that creativity requires both originality and effectiveness. Properly, ideas and products that are merely original might be useless. Variants of the standard definition also look at novelty and value or novelty and appropriateness.

However, the standard definition presents some ambiguities. Regarding originality and usefulness, it has been observed:

Originality and effectiveness are relative notions (Colin, 2017):

• 1.

  Originality is not an absolute. It is relative to a context: originality can only be measured relative to social background and depends on historical-cultural factors.

• 2.

  Effectiveness results from an evaluation: effectiveness, goodness, relevance can only be measured with respect to goals and a set of criteria or values.

Many other open questions do not facilitate the definition of creativity. For instance, although the idea is broadly shared that all people are born with creative potential, the common-sense experience shows that there are people who are creative and other people, the most, who are scantily creative or not at all. Another question concerns the value and benefit of being creative. The history of science and technology abounds with great scientists to whom the credit of their discoveries has been denied for historical reasons, personal events, gender issues, and even a series of unfortunate events. There are many geniuses who, with their scientific contribution, have changed human history and who, for sometimes unclear reasons, have ended up in the shadows, giving their fame to others and fading in the memory of time. From chemistry to medicine, up to biology, physics, and mathematics, there are geniuses left in the shadows, such as Trotula De Ruggiero, Antonio Meucci, Lise Meitner, Alfred Russel Wallace, Augusta Ada Byron (Lady Lovelace), Vincenzo Tiberio, Rosalind Franklin, Giuseppe Brotzu, to name just a few (Milly, & Serra, 2021). It is well known that Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone but stole the idea without acknowledgment from Antonio Meucci. Steve Jobs, quoting Picasso, claimed that all artists (feeling himself being an artist) are thieves of ideas. Thomas S. Eliot expressed the same concept affirming that “the immature poet imitates and the mature poet plagiarizes” (Dufresne, 2004, 59). Jobs declared that he and his company always built upon the ideas of others, and he did not apologize for this (Hurley-Hanson & Giannantonio, 2013). Steve Jobs and Bill Gates exploited the ideas of the researchers of the Palo Alto Research Center, created, in 1970, by Jack Goldman assembling the brightest minds in the world of computer science. It is famous that in a meeting with Jobs, Gates, looking Jobs in the eyes, shouted what became a striking sentence: “I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it” (Becraft, 2016, p. 54).

Another question concerns the so-called dark side of creativity (Cropley, Cropley, Kaufman, & Runco, 2010; McLaren, 1993). In this regard, Runco claims that: