Creativity at Social Scale Part 1
Creativity as a Public Good
Check out Part 2: Building Creative Societies and Part 3: Designing for Scale
Steven J. Tepper and Terence E. McDonnell
Creativity is a critical resource for education and democracy. As much as creativity is celebrated, it is misunderstood. Though most people do not know what creativity is, everyone seems to want it. When surveyed, the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies say creativity is the number one skill they look for in recent graduates. Educators claim creativity as a core 21st-century skill. High school students say they want careers that allow them to be creative. Countless personal coaches and self-help books encourage people to embrace the “artist’s way,” to don “the 7 hats of creativity,” unleash “right brain” thinking, and use play to “spark imagination.” Meanwhile, mayors across the US look for the special sauce to become “creative cities” that attract picky “creative class workers” who want to work and live in places that stimulate their next big idea.
The idea of “scale” is trotted out these days as much as, if not more than, creativity. We need scalable solutions for a range of problems. For instance, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is seeking ways to scale innovative education models. The MacArthur Foundation launched its 100&Change competition to invest $100 million in a single idea that can scale to solve problems like homelessness, ocean health, and mosquito-borne diseases. Scale is about flexibly propagating established interventions to positively impact more people (Seelos and Mair 2017). Scale is the buzzword for higher education leaders who are concerned about meeting the needs of hundreds of millions of learners who seek knowledge, tools, and pathways. John List, in The Voltage Effect, argues that all breakthroughs – whether in medicine, new products, or social movements – can only achieve impact if they can be replicated at scale.
If the idea of scale feels robust, muscular, enduring, and impactful, our notions of creativity feel fragile, special, unpredictable, temporary, tied to charismatic artists, inventors or entrepreneurs, and, importantly, rooted in historical notions of individual genius. Creativity is seen as rare and exclusive – something that happens in special places (e.g., labs, stages, museums, studios) or by special people (e.g., creatives, artists, designers), but not in everyday places or by everyday people. Our society imagines that creativity bursts forth in just the right contexts – highly innovative organizational cultures (e.g., Apple, Google, 3M, or the MIT Media Lab) or innovation milieus (e.g., Silicon Valley in the 1990s or Vienna in the early 20th century or New Orleans’ 9th Ward). While we can point to creative individuals, places, organizations, or eras, we cannot envision creative societies where creativity has scaled and is integrated into and supported by social systems. What if those who see creativity as fuel for human thriving and social change begin to take scale seriously?
Creativity–the act of generating ideas, making unexpected connections, openness to novelty and difference, taking risks, and generating social meaning through shared stories and expression–is a powerful asset to advance our democracy and our planet. We view creativity as a public good that is essential to the social good because it helps us imagine alternative futures, fuels empathy and connection, drives civic engagement, and creates adaptable and resilient individuals and communities. Arts leader and urbanist Maria Rosario Jackson asks, “Why have we not thought of [arts and culture] as core to our resilience, sustainability and advancement, to our health and well-being?” But if creativity is to drive this type of social good, then we need to consider a new frame. We need creativity at a social scale – creative engagements that reach more people, creativity that is embedded in more places and connected to more areas of economic and social life, and creative tools that are accessible to everyone.
We acknowledge that creativity can be found in every field and discipline, but we focus on the creativity found in arts and design in this essay. We do so partly because this is an area of our own expertise but also because these fields are explicitly focused on nurturing and demonstrating creative competencies – tolerating ambiguity, generating ideas, taking risks, learning to critique and give feedback, learning to collaborate around emerging ideas, “what if” thinking, storytelling, and reasoning with analogies. In fact, in a survey of college majors conducted by one of the authors of this essay, only 3% of Biology majors and 10% of Economics majors say that “generating new ideas” was a common experience in their classes; compare this to the 85% arts and design majors who say this is common. Finally, while artistic creativity often leads to invention and new discoveries (e.g., artists were critical to the advancement of ceramics, metallurgy, fireworks, flying machines, prosthetics, material science, ecology, and more), creative expression has the additional public benefit of contributing to our collective culture – the stories and symbols that we share, celebrate, and build our communities around.
Creativity at social scale will not be easy. As sociologists of culture, we recognize that creativity is inherently disruptive. Much of sociology focuses on the grooves that get worn into the wood of social life. These grooves are the explicit and implicit rules and roles that govern how we communicate, how we interact, and how we organize our work, communities, friendships, and families. It turns out that living together is hard, filled with potential mistakes, missteps, and misunderstandings, so we build grooves to make things more predictable. Predictability, in turn, breeds trust, and trust is the currency of social life.
But how do things change when so much of our world is entrained in deep grooves? How do we overcome biases? How do we shed those rules and roles that are not serving individuals or our communities well? How do we become open to new possibilities for change and growth? How do we create new forms of expression and communication that help us see or feel something unique and powerful? In short, how can we embrace creativity as a core part of our social operating system? Without understanding the dynamics of scale or being intentional about how we scale creativity, then creativity will remain on the margins instead of at the center of how we educate, work, and build community. If arts leaders are to drive change, then they will have to design the machinery and infrastructure so that creativity can scale. We will return to this point in the conclusion of part 3 of this essay.
Some describe creativity as one of humankind’s most renewable resources – it can and often does arise in spaces of scarcity; it builds on itself as creative ideas are elaborated and expanded; it is a public good (like education) because its influence grows as more people have access to its expression and its tools; and it drives human discovery. It is extraordinary that such an abundant and powerful resource has been restricted for most of human history. Until Guttenberg, reading and writing, source materials for creativity, were restricted to priests and nobles. Throughout history, access to creative careers –whether in science or the arts – has been tightly controlled through guilds, specialized credentials, and union membership. And access to education, platforms, and funding for creative expression – the gallery system, radio play, record labels, publishers, movie studios, concert halls, Broadway, and start-up capital – has always passed through exceedingly narrow and inequitable gates. For example, “Black artists’ contributions are systematically overlooked…research shows that racism impacts all stages of Black artists’ careers” (Greenland and Banks 2021). Across creative fields, many aspire, but only a select few are chosen.
Moreover, access to the training, mentorship, and networks that are necessary to develop talent and credibility in creative fields has always been restricted – admissions into competitive science programs or top arts and design colleges are so selective that these fields don’t even come close to representing the creative diversity of our population. We pick, select, filter, and reject so many aspiring creatives that many are turned off or turned away before they even get in the game. Moreover, those who do make it through the narrow gates are increasingly cut from the same cloth, which limits the potential for new ideas and approaches to emerge – homogeneity breeds consistency; diversity fuels change and innovation (Uzzi and Spiro 2005; Phillips 2014).
Finally, ever since the Romantic era, notions of creativity have been bound up with individual genius, unbridled passion, “madness,” compulsion, and a willingness to sacrifice everything – money, family, social position – in order to bring a new idea into the world. This “myth” of the starving artist, the mad scientist, the misanthropic creator – “creativity at all costs” – is perhaps the biggest barrier of all. The stories we have told ourselves about creativity – whether in novels, or films, or plays, or biographies – have caused too many people to drop out of creative pursuits because they do not believe they have what it takes (Blackwood and Purcell 2014; Kulinski 2023).
So if we agree that creativity is a critical public resource, how can we scale it for access and impact? First, we need to increase access to creative education. Second, creative expression should be mobilized to renew civic engagement and political participation. Third, creativity, and specifically the methods of artists and designers, should be integrated into other social scale systems – like health, sustainability, housing, and education. In part 2 of this essay, we outline these dimensions of scale and reflect on strategies that arts leaders can embrace to leverage creativity for the public good.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blackwood, A., & Purcell, D. 2014. “Curating inequality: The link between cultural reproduction and race in the visual arts.” Sociological Inquiry. 84(2): 238-263.
Greenland, Fiona and Patricia Banks. 2021. “Race and Sociology of Art.” Sociology of Culture Newsletter. https://asaculturesection.org/2021/03/15/race-and-sociology-of-art/
Jackson, Maria Rosario. 2021. “Addressing Inequity Through Public Health, Community Development, Arts, and Culture: Confluence of Fields and the Opportunity to Reframe, Retool, and Repair.” Journal of Health Promotion Practice. Volume 22, Issue 1.
Kreidler, John. 1996. “Leverage Lost: The Nonprofit in the Post Ford Era.” Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, February 1996.
Kulinski, A. R. 2023. “Threads of the White Web: Exposing and Contesting the Hegemony of Whiteness in Art Education.” Studies in Art Education. 64(2): 169-180.
List, John. 2022. The Voltage Effect. Currency.
Pearson, Tamara. 2017. “How creativity is killed in the Majority World.” The New Internationalist, November 15.
Phillips, Katherine W. 2014. “How Diversity Works.” Scientific American. 311(4): 42-47.
Seelos, Christian and Johanna Mair. 2017. Innovation and Scaling for Impact: How Effective Social Enterprises Do It. Stanford University Press.
Talk of the Nation. 2013. “A Valentine's Campaign To End Violence.”
https://www.npr.org/2013/02/14/172017169/a-valentines-campaign-to-end-violence
Uzzi, Brian, and Jarrett Spiro. 2005. “Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem.” The American Journal of Sociology. 111(2): 447-504.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Steven J. Tepper is dean and professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, the nation’s largest, comprehensive design and arts school at a research university. Tepper is a sociologist and leading writer and speaker on higher education and U.S. cultural policy, and his work has fostered national discussions around topics of cultural engagement, creative work and careers, art and democracy, and the transformative possibilities of a 21st-century creative campus.
Terence E. McDonnell is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He is a cultural sociologist who studies the role of art, media, and creativity in everyday life. He examines how resonance and persuasion shape behavior by examining cases as diverse as HIV prevention campaigns, protest art, awareness ribbons, art installations, images of President Obama, virtual reality experiences, and junk drawers. He is the author of Best Laid Plans: Cultural Entropy and the Unraveling of AIDS Media Campaigns (University of Chicago, 2016) and Measuring Culture (Columbia University 2020).
