Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation (review)

I rarely see a definition of creativity that captures its mystery, magic and promise. More commonly, I find myself puzzling over the morass of definitions that conclude: creativity, while transformative, is indefinable. This is not to say that interested parties have not tried to add more substance to the puzzle. Some fill this vacuum with analogies. One I have always found appealing is found in Lewis Carroll's classic Alice in Wonderland, where he both reminds us of the need to think creatively and pokes fun at how we approach this need. The episode that comes to mind has Alice, who recognizes that she has become too small, derive an excellent plan to remedy the situation. She then admits to herself that although her plan is very neatly and simply arranged, she has no idea how to set it in place. In the book, after creatively solving problem after problem, Alice continues onward, addressing a litany of events she can neither control nor understand; and the process is presented over and over and over again. Alice's adventures are not only fun but also bring to mind why some people dislike the correlation of creativity and problem solving, feeling that problem solving misses the spontaneity, emotional attachment and passion we bring to successful, creative projects. It should be noted that Alice's challenges in Wonderland allowed Lewis Carroll, an English author, mathematician, logician and photographer, to poke fun at British education.

Many academics and interested parties continue to weigh in on the creativity conundrum. I would guess that even non-specialists who are drawn to the subject have encountered popular psychological studies like Csikzentmihalyi's "flow" or Gardner's idea of multiple intelligences. Those who have looked for in-depth research, perhaps in cognitive neuroscience, have no doubt wrestled with how researchers who design studies that test a subject's ability to solve problems the investigators have already answered can purport to address the kind of innovation a genuinely creative person expresses when bringing something no one thought of before into being. There are also thinkers in related fields (such as education and philosophy) who wrestle with the tension between theory and application. Then, of course, there are the many artists and scientists who offer no theories of creativity; they are instead predisposed to explore experientially, which means that creativity is implicit in their work even if never explicitly defined.

Working with this complicated matrix over the years, I have concluded that case studies of actual creative development offer the best approaches for navigating the amorphous creativity terrain. This preference drew me to David Edwards's new book Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation, wherein he introduces a number of people to walk us through idea translation (how those who use the art/science combination put their ideas together in cultural institutions, academia, humanitarian causes, and industry). The cast of characters includes Diana Dabby, who wanted to pioneer in music composition, started as a pianist and then returned to get a degree in electrical engineering as she translated her ideas into innovative theories of music composition. She is currently a music professor at Olin College, a new liberal arts and engineering college outside of Boston. Julio Ottino, a chemical engineer, developed a new theory of fluid mixing that benefited from his experience with creative painting and a doctoral degree in chemical engineering. Wolf Peter Fehlhammer, a German chemist, became the director of the Deutsches Museum, the largest and oldest museum in Germany devoted to the history of science and technology. This museum ranks with the great technical museums of the world: the Science Museum in London, the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers in Paris and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. According to Edwards, Fehlhammer was concerned with how to engage artists so that the museum would provide an environment that could disrupt the way the public viewed science. He wanted to both empower artists...