Build for creativity

"If a society hopes to achieve renewal, it will have to be a hospitable environment for creative men & women." —John W. Gardner

Making places beautiful is an often overlooked measure we can employ to make places that last. But the final nuance we can build into our projects to make them extra magical, attractive, and resilient is to design them specifically for creativity and highly creative people.

Highly creative people tend to be different from the general population in certain ways that have implications in the built environment. Building for highly creative people is somewhat akin to building for wheelchair accessibility—it helps the people in wheelchairs a lot and doesn’t harm anyone else. In fact, it will likely help most everyone else, too.

First of all, this is good business, too.

General observation and now official studies begin to tell us that property values go up when artists move into a neighborhood. People who create cultural value lend a certain cachet that often cause a positive chain reaction in a place, drawing more people, jobs, and ultimately economic wealth.

Beyond that, Pew research shows every generation describes their own cohort as “uniquely creative/innovative/artistic” and many independent marketing studies find the number one way people in the younger generations describe themselves is creative (followed by “open-minded” and “adventurous”—two more traits associated with creative people). Building a place specifically for creativity/creatives (who are always on the front of the adoption curve) will bring a more mass market, but it doesn’t work the other way around—building a place for a mass market will not attract creatives nor foster creativity to the same degree.

And beyond that, creative thinking is ultimately the best resource we can give those next seven generations to figure out how to navigate all the gifts and challenges they will encounter.

Creative, creatives

Let’s first clarify the terms…creative officially means: something that is novel and useful. And yes, everyone is creative.

The term “creatives” can become a bit more controversial and loaded but here, we’re simply using it to describe people who do creative work professionally or are exceptionally creative. Similarly, pretty much everyone can do math or write but we call people who do math for a living or are exceptionally good at math “mathematicians” and we don’t call everyone a “writer”. It becomes more dicey when we add in the cultural perceptions of creatives and high creativity. Does a person want to labeled that way? And it can get more controversial when we start talking about the more recent developments in the science of highly creative people. How much of it is genetic and beyond our control? For our purposes here, we will simply focus on a way of operating, and how it can be fostered by the built environment.

Traits of highly creative people

seminal studies

According to research at U.C. Berkeley on a group of highly creative people (actors, directors, architects, scientists, entrepreneurs, writers, etc.), the common traits that people across all creative fields seemed to have in common are:

• an openness to one’s inner life

• a preference for complexity & ambiguity

• an unusually high tolerance for disorder and disarray

• the ability to extract order from chaos

• independence

• unconventionality

• a willingness to take risks

• complexity

The study's findings convinced Donald MacKinnon, the man who led the project, that “there is indeed such a thing as a creative mind and way of doing things.” And there was a central trait at the core:

“It is personal courage, courage of the mind and spirit, psychological and spiritual courage that is the radix of a creative person. The courage to question what is generally accepted; the courage to be destructive in order that something better can be constructed; the courage to think thoughts unlike anyone-else's…the courage to follow one's intuition rather than logic…the courage to stand aside from the collectivity and in conflict with it if necessary, the courage to become and to be oneself.” source

complex extremes

“The creative genius may be at once naïve and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and to rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person.” —above mentioned Berkeley study

Similarly, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, head of psychology at the University of Chicago, said after more than 30 years of observing creative people:

“If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it’s complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an ‘individual,’ each of them is a ‘multitude.’”

Between the two sources above, some key observations were that creative people tend to be...

• both more primitive & more cultured

• more destructive & more constructive

• psychologically more androgynous (exhibiting the strengths of masculine & feminine characteristics)

• smart yet naive at the same time, always young in spirit

• playful & disciplined

• heightened sense of reality & imagination

• both introverted & extroverted

• more psychological pathology & score extremely high on all measures of psychological health

• more energy & more rest

Full article here.

Aesthetes

It's important to remember that creatives, especially those in visual fields, are more aesthetically advanced than the general population. They have likely been trained in and practice art as professionals. They have high standards and are super aware when something is off—it may bother them deeply.

Many of them will be aesthetes—people having a great sensitivity to beauty. These are people who will generally have fewer, more beautiful things. It’s important to them that their bikes and clothing, for example, are beautiful. They want their surroundings and daily objects to be both beautiful and congruent with their internal values.

Neurological differences

Advances in neuroimaging show us that creatives' minds are structurally different than the general population—they are literally wired differently.

People excelling in creativity tend to be neurologically atypical and are naturally good at some things and not so good at others. But isn't that true of everyone? There is movement toward framing this kind of conversation around neurodiversity, which suggests there are many neurological predispositions favorable for different roles at different times. It's still early to make many conclusions about creatives' minds but here are some patterns emerging about people with high levels of creativity:

2e (twice exceptional)

This is a new term (backed by 35 years of research) used to describe people who demonstrate signs of both giftedness as well as learning or attention difficulties. Below are some of the most common neurological differences common in creatives that are easily misunderstood and come with challenges.

HSP (highly sensitive people)

HSP, also called SPS (sensory processing sensitivity), was pioneered by psychologist Elaine Aron in the mid-90's.

• 15-20% of the population that both senses & processes things (lights, sounds, textures, smell, emotions, pain, chemicals, etc.) more deeply than others. Significantly, this is too many people to be a considered a disorder. It’s just a different way of experiencing the world.

• occurs in the same ratios in males and females and every other species tested so far including deer, horses, & even fruit flies

• may or may not have heightened abilities to see, hear, smell, taste, or feel, but at a minimum they process stimuli more deeply than non-hsp peers

• tend to need more rest to process stimuli
  
  

Needs

In most ways, creatives have the same needs as the general population, the key difference is that with creatives, because they are usually highly sensitive, all of those needs are heightened and they need them met with more precision. It's like most people are built more like a pickup truck and others (15-20%) are built more like a high performance sports car (hsp's). Both are valuable, but they perform best in different environments and with different levels and types of care.

optimal arousal

Another difference is what's called optimal arousal—that magic equilibrium where one is not over or under stimulated by their environment. This will be slightly different for each person but on the whole, creatives tend to have a much lower threshold for stimulation. This is because every sight, smell, sound, texture, sign to read, and vibe to feel uses a squirt of serotonin—and creatives tend to notice all the details. This uses up their daily serotonin (happy juice) ration much faster than the general population and leaves them overstimulated and exhausted, usually without knowing why.

flow cycle 

Creatives are not driven by external constructs like calendars, clocks, or money, as much as they are driven by the flow cycle. Anyone can get into a flow state but creatives tend to get there more often than the average Joe. However, most people, highly creative or not, don’t know about the other three stages you have to go through before you get back to a flow state. Creatives can get addicted to flow like people get hooked on drugs. Understanding the flow cycle creates a better level of self-awareness and ultimately flourishing.

Designing for creativity

Bonus idea: Play with scale sometimes

Summary

Creativity is an important part of a place enduring. Deeply understanding creativity allows us to design an environment that promotes creative thought and attracts highly creative people which will bring many positive results and many more kinds of people. Designing for creative people will help them be their best and likely boost everyone else’s creativity, too. Not many people have ever complained, “oh, it’s too beautiful here,” or “I wish there were more ads everywhere”.