Design Feast Series: Quotes

“…creativity isn’t a specific activity; it’s a quality of things we do. You can be creative in anything—in math, science, engineering, philosophy—as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance. And you can certainly be involved in the arts in ways that are especially creative. And so it’s important to emphasize that it’s not about creating some small space in schools where people can be creative, and particularly not if that means just tacking on some art programs on a Friday afternoon. It’s about the way we do things. … We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. It’s much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that aren’t present here and now. You know, to conceive of the past, to anticipate the future, and not just a future but multiple possible futures and many different sorts of pasts.

So this capacity for imagination, to me, is absolutely at the heart of this whole argument. Creativity to me is a step on. Creativity is putting your imagination to work and it’s produced the most extraordinary results in human culture. I mean, it is really the foundation of human culture, I believe. And it’s generated multiple ways of looking at the world, multiple ways of seeing it, multiple ways of thinking about it.”

Sir Ken Robinson, Author