3 Margaret Boden’s Three Types of Creativity
Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable.
—Margaret Boden39
Margaret Boden is a research professor of cognitive science at the University of Sussex and the author of the widely read The Creative Mind: Myths & Mechanisms, published in 1990. She has studied creativity, particularly in the context of computer science, for many years, looking into the creative aspects of computers and their similarities to the workings of the human brain.40 She defines creativity as the ability to come up with products—ideas or artifacts—that are new, surprising, and of value.41
She goes on to provide three criteria by which we can assess to what extent an idea or an artifact can be considered creative: “A creative idea must be useful, illuminating or challenging in some way.”42 It’s not enough simply to be novel. To be truly creative, an idea needs to be genuinely original—a creative leap. It also needs to be unexpected and of genuine value.
Boden’s deceptively simple categories have spawned much discussion on creativity, what it is, and what the most suitable criteria are to assess it. Are her three criteria sufficient? Or are they too imprecise to be useful? Are there other criteria that might equally well be applied?
Let’s examine a few responses to Boden’s criteria.
Dean Simonton, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis, studies the sociocultural factors in creativity. He questions how many criteria are really necessary. Some researchers consider two to be optimal: originality and effectiveness, for example.43 Simonton likens Boden’s three criteria “to those of the U.S. Patent Office, namely, to earn patent protection an invention must be new, useful, and non-obvious.”44
Sir Ken Robinson, an educator, prolific writer on creativity, and advisor on the subject to governments, defines creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value.”45 This of course raises the question of how to define value.
Anna Jordanous is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing at the University of Kent, researching human and machine creativity. “Most people are relatively happy with novelty and value as a definition of creativity—certainly subject to aesthetics and correctness,” she says.46
French composer and computer scientist François Pachet takes a different line. He believes that creativity can be understood only in subjective terms, not objective ones. “Society will decide whether someone is creative or not,” he says.47
Tony Veale of University College Dublin asserts that creativity cannot be defined. “We call something creative when it fits a certain narrative,” he says.48 We can tell stories of how Thomas Edison invented the electric lightbulb or Leonardo da Vinci created his paintings, but such descriptions are entirely subjective and depend on the attitudes and state of knowledge of the society of the day. Some of the most important creative ideas and artifacts are not recognized as such for years. Many great artists die in obscurity, Vincent van Gogh being a prime example.
Novelty, value, and surprise: Are these all there is to creativity? As criteria, they focus on the product rather than the process. But surely the process of creativity is equally as important as the final product. In The Creative Mind, Boden takes a long look at the creative process. She breaks it down into three types and proposes three “different psychological mechanisms, eliciting different sorts of surprise.”49
First there is “combinatorial creativity,” combining familiar ideas in unfamiliar ways. These include analogies, like comparing the heart to a pump, and metaphors—like the atom acting as if it is a miniscule solar system, the core of Niels Bohr’s theory of the atom. Sometimes this process of combination can be purely statistical, playing around with material to see what emerges, like cutting out words in a printed poem, tossing them around, and gluing them on a sheet of paper to create another poem. The results of such combinations can generate surprise or even shock.
Next comes “exploratory creativity,” working within accepted rules of procedure, as in art, literature, music, and indeed science, and trying to generate new styles, new sentences, new melodies, new theories—something that only you and no one else has ever thought of before. It’s like exploring a familiar place and finding something new there, as indeed we all do every day.
Finally there is “transformational creativity,” which is domain busting and full of surprises. It can be a leap of the imagination, resulting from the artist or scientist feeling so constrained and frustrated by existing rules that they burst out, creating something that rewrites the rule book. Thus Beethoven launched the Romantic period in classical music and Einstein discovered relativity theory, showing that the world of our experience is a mere approximation of what’s really out there. Niels Bohr discovered modern atomic theory, casting further doubt on our perceptions of the world, and Cézanne pushed impressionism toward the more abstract postimpressionism—which, along with important sources such as the mathematical, scientific, and technological developments of the day, was the springboard from which Picasso created cubism.
It is often difficult to separate these three processes. Analogy and metaphor, aspects of combinatorial creativity, are often essential to discover domain-breaking theories—transformational creativity.
Boden appreciates that it may take years for the results of transformational creativity to be recognized because they are often so outlandish that they may seem jolting or repellent, causing disgust or disbelief.50 Some thinkers interpret this disgust at dramatic new developments as evidence that we have inherent limitations in our cognitive systems. But if this were the case, then any progress would be virtually impossible. It is probably better to see it—particularly in music—as a matter of time. The journey from Mozart to the Sex Pistols could not have happened overnight.
Another way to look at this is in terms of little-c creativity and big-C Creativity, which I introduced earlier. This terminology dates back at least as far as 1988.51 To elaborate, little-c creativity is an everyday experience such as thinking up a new route to work, a discovery that has novelty, value, and surprise, at least for the discoverer. Everyone is little-c creative. Big-C Creativity is altogether different. It is spectacular and can be domain breaking. It’s an idea that no one else has ever had in the history of the world. Only a few geniuses are capable of arriving at such ideas. Such transformational ideas have to be generally accepted, and it may take time for them to be recognized for what they are.
In 1905, Einstein published four papers that would change the course of physics and of history.52 The fourth contained a result he had overlooked in his previous paper, the relativity paper. This was the famous equivalence between mass and energy, E = mc2. But initially these four papers were ignored, and when they were appreciated at all it was for the wrong reasons. The consensus was that the relativity paper simply improved on one of the current theories of the electron. We now look back on 1905 as Einstein’s annus mirabilis—but only in retrospect. It was not seen as such at the time.
Similarly Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon contained the seeds of cubism, but at the time no one understood what he had achieved. The painting was reviled by critics, the public, and his friends. “Another big daub by Picasso” and “a nightmare,” wrote the art critics of the time.53
The point is that Einstein’s papers undoubtedly contained conclusions that were novel, surprising, and had great value, as is now universally recognized, but no one identified them as such at the time. The same is true of Picasso’s early cubist works. It was only some years after their first appearance that these works were finally recognized as supreme examples of big-C Creativity.
But at least Einstein’s and Picasso’s works were recognized in their lifetimes. Such was not the case for van Gogh and Emily Dickinson, both of whom died in obscurity. During Bach’s lifetime, only a few dedicated admirers understood that he was drawing together a great number of musical developments in his sublime cantatas, inventions, and variations, often with complex counterpoints. To do this, he crossed the line into mathematics many times and crossed back again. After his death, his reputation declined; it was only rescued by Felix Mendelssohn when he performed the Saint Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829.
There have also been occasions when the products of big-C Creativity have not stood the test of time. For example, in 1912, Nils Gustav Dalen was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of gas lighting for buoys and lighthouses. His invention has long since been rendered obsolete.54
As these examples suggest, big-C Creativity is much more complex than little-c creativity. They also show how subjective the judgments of novelty, surprise, and value can be.