Diseño y Creatividad

On creativity & design.
As designers, creativity is generally understood to be a big part of our industry. Often, people in this field are actually referred to as “creatives” and I’ve heard and been a part of discussions that label the design process as “doing the creative”. Obviously, there’s an important relationship, but the question that I want to consider in this article is: just how muchof a role does creativity actually have in design?

On Creativity and Design
The question itself depends a great deal on your definition of creativity. In my view, there are basically two ways of looking at the concept, one of which is very broad, while the other is really somewhat restrictive. In this article, we will consider the meaning of creativity and work towards a possible understandingof its role in the design process.

Broad Creativity
The way of understanding the concept of creativity is simply that being “creative” is a matter of having the ability to create. By this definition, the human being is, at its core, a creative creature. We make all kinds of things. We craft tools, construct buildings, build communities and so forth.

From this perspective, I truly believethat all people are ultimately creative in some capacity. We all make different kinds of things, and most of us take some form of pride in the product.
Getting back to the question of design, however, if we take this very broad understanding of creativity, then I think that it’s safe to say that most (if not all) of the design is creative. After all, the entire process is centred around creatingsomething. Each step contributes to the same ultimate goal (or at least it should), namely to create the finished design, whether it be a poster, a logo, a website or something else entirely.
Now, I can already anticipate a counter argument suggesting that some parts of the process aren’t creative. For instance, I’m currently in the process of developing a skeleton WordPress theme that I can useas a tool for more rapid development of custom (and perhaps in the future, premium) themes. The argument could, perhaps, be made that because I am reusing the same product, that this part of the process is not creative at all.
But why not? Simply because there is nothing new about it?
If we look at our first understanding of creativity, however, it includes absolutely nothing about the need to benew. It is simply a matter of creating something. If an artist paints a painting with brushes that they have used before, is the creativity of the piece in any way compromised because the brushes are not new? Not at all!
If the creative part of design is based solely in the creation itself, then my simple skeleton theme is as much a part of the creative process as anything else.
RestrictiveCreativity
However, by emphasizing the importance of newness, this particular argument does bring us at least part way to second definition of creativity, and the one that I think resonates more strongly through our culture. In a nutshell, that definition has to do with originality and innovation.
By embracing this definition of creativity, we are ultimately saying that the creative person is he orshe who is blessed with the ability to conceive new and original ideas, moving things forward in interesting and previously un-conceived (or at least un-attempted) ways. Creativity, then becomes the realm of a certain form of genius – that which we so often call the “creative genius”.
When it comes to design, this ultimately changes everything surrounding our driving question. If creativitydoes, in fact, exist in the realm of the new, the original and the as-yet-unseen, then I would have to say that very little about design actually has to do with creativity.
To start with, how many websites are there out there that look exactly like all the other websites out there? I’m not asking this question with any form of judgement, since many of these similar looking sites are actually very...