Update: Building blocks of creativity

There has been a lot of useful feedback from my previous post reporting on my empirically-derived definition of creativity.

As a result, and after some more work that I have done, I've updated the results.

These factors form 'building blocks' of creativity - they contribute to the overall idea of what creativity is. This could also be thought of as an ontology of creativity - a collection of information relating to the nature of creativity.

                           Creativity is...

To expand on these 14 factors, here is a diagram with a little more detail in each factor. (Click on the diagram to enlarge it)

Depending on what creative domain you are looking at (e.g. art, music, problem solving, proof generation, language use, design etc.) some of these factors will be more important than others.

From the results of a survey on musical improvisation, this is a breakdown of which factors are more important (and less so) in this type of creativity:

The importance of different components of creativity, in the context of creative musical improvisation. This illustrates the results of a survey of 34 people, spanning a variety of musical backgrounds from novice to professional expert. Note that some factors are considered to have some negative influence on creativity as well as a positive influence, e.g. Domain Competence.

The next step in this work is to use the survey data and above results to evaluate and compare a number of music improvisation systems, to explore which are more creative than others and why. Results coming soon...