Dear reader,
Do you remember this model?
In today's article, I will discuss the four areas of concern. I already mentioned the rules, the four pillars and the 6-phase model, but another important aspect of the Creative Platform are these areas: confidence, concentration, motivation and knowledge application. Let's take a look at each area and see how it all connects:
Confidence - this is the first area of concern. Let me quote the professor, whose PhD work creates my service: in order to achieve the necessary level of confidence, the Creative Platform makes the individual have experience of not feeling judged by others and not feeling judged by oneself. Being around other people is a constant test of a person’s personality, social competencies and in a university setting (for example) also the person’s disciplinary competencies (Byrge, 2011). This leads to arousal, which affects peoples’ creativity. In other words, if you feel the pressure to show your abilities, to demonstrate skills and perform in some way, and if you are put under the spotlight, your behaviour changes and you do not feel confident. This creates a tense relationship between people and hereby increase arousal which leads to a decrease in the level of creativity (Byrge, 2011). Meaning that you don’t feel confident enough to express your thoughts and remarks, thus limiting your participation in the creative process.
The second area of concern is concentration and it is expressed by having full concentration over the task you are performing. This is the mode where all other needs ranging from physiological needs, security need, love and belonging needs, esteem need, and the experience needs are fulfilled (Byrge, 2011). Meaning that if all basic needs of the human being are taken care of, he/she is able to fully concentrate on other needs, such as solving a problem, thus allowing creativity to emerge. Furthermore, here it is essential to mention that the more tasks you have, the stressed you feel, the less concentrated you are. It seems like the amount of “thinking tasks” versus the amount of capable attention of a human has a strong relation to the level of creativity (Byrge, 2011). Therefore, the Creative Platform has adopted the rule: “one task – one deadline”, which means that all participants receive one task at a time and when this task is completed, they receive the next one.
Next comes motivation. This area overlaps (with confidence) since both have a focus on the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is the drive to engage in a task because it is interesting, while extrinsic motivation is the drive to engage in a task for some reason outside the task itself. Therefore (it was) found that any intrinsic or extrinsic motivation factor that increases the person concentration on the task is good for creativity (Byrge, 2011).
The last area of concern is the knowledge application. Knowledge (and experience) may provide the building blocks out of which new ideas are constructed (Byrge, 2011). The problem when a person contains all this knowledge and experience from a particular field is that he/she will find it difficult to think out of the box (Byrge, 2011). Furthermore, the most recently used knowledge has a higher priority than the knowledge we have not used for a long time ago. These are the so-called activated knowledge versus hidden/stored knowledge, which the Creative Platform is seeking to unlock with its tools (remember the Mind Map task). One of the goals of the Creative Platform is “stored knowledge from one area of the memory (to be) applied to a problem related to another area of the memory” (Byrge, 2011).
I hope you get the gist of it! If you haven't - take a look at the previous articles and you will get a hang of the information. I know I haven't been persistent to the topics or so it seems, but more or less I am trying to paint a picture and grade it from the most important aspects of the workshop to the least important ones. These are also the topics and their sequence by which I start to create a workshop, based on the Creative Platform. It seems illogical, but in my defence - I start with the basics - the tasks that must be present in the workshop and work my way around the logic behind the tasks and the rules that need to be invoked in the creative process.
So, I hope you enjoyed it! Thank you for reading my article!
Cheers from me!