Creative Fluency
How will you use your creativity today?
Creativity is present in every human being. It is also very diverse, with each individual demonstrating their unique creative qualities in different ways, to different degrees, in different aspects of life, and for different reasons. Creative fluency happens when people understand and embrace this diversity within themselves and others.
The Creative Fluency Project is designed to inform and provide people with the resources to enhance their creative potential and encourage it in others. Click below to explore and learn more:
Compendium
Research
Education
Attitudes
Terminology
Inspiration
Variety
Engage
Creativity Compendium
This collection of creativity techniques, readings, media, exercises, and more can be used individually, in a group, in a classroom, at home, at work, at play, by anyone anywhere! The Creativity Compendium is constantly growing, with new resources being added each week, so be sure to visit often.
Research
An idea doesn’t have to be radical to be creative. Incremental ideas are creative too, as well as everything in between. Researchers now recognize that creativity is highly diverse and needs to be modeled in terms of multiple factors, including creative level (e.g., knowledge, experience), creative style (preference for structure), and motivation (reasons for creativity).
Education
How can we help people explore and use their innate creativity? The resources provided on this website are an excellent way to get started!
- Educators: Integrate our content into your courses and research
- Students: Apply the techniques to generate, refine, or select ideas for your assignments and projects
- Lifelong learners: Practice the techniques and read about the cognitive science behind creativity
Terminology
What is the difference between divergent and convergent thinking? How are they related to creativity? The terminology around creativity can be confusing at times, especially when the same terms are used in different ways by different people. To help make sense of the creative landscape, we offer a simple dictionary related to creativity and associated topics.
Inspiration
What inspired the Creative Fluency Project? Sometimes a faculty member wants to encourage creative thinking in her classroom and hurriedly creates an activity, not realizing that resources already exist. Or a student is looking for ways to generate new ideas for his capstone project and can’t find the right techniques to help. To address this problem, we wanted to identify existing resources that support Creative Fluency for use by greater numbers of faculty, students, and others.
Variety
The way creativity is taught often ignores the latest findings from research, and this can be problematic. Specifically, creativity is often discussed as if there is only one type (the radical breakthrough), which ignores decades of research from the behavioral sciences highlighting the diversity of creativity. With this in mind, we were also inspired to highlight current creativity research, so users can apply the findings and gain greater insight about their own creativity along the way.
Engage
Join us in creating even more creativity resources to share! Do you have an original technique, activity, reading, research article, or other resource you want to see here? Do you have a go-to resource that you don’t see in the Compendium? We welcome your ideas! Original content will be given credit, so others who visit the website will recognize your work.