Possibly the most incredible scene in Runway Project, Season 16 is the one in which Kentaro plays Tim Gunn a piano piece. Afterwards, they have the following conversation…
Tim Gunn : What gave you this idea?
Kentaro: Well, so I find a dead cat on the street and after I bury the cat I put my ear to the ground and this is the kind of sound I heard.
On the face of it, most of us might think that Kentaro’s approach is slightly oddball so I was surprised, when reading a chapter by Torrance on creativity to find that one artistic definition of creativity is “talking listening to a cat…crossing out mistakes”.
But how is that a test of creativity?
Torrance had two major approaches to understanding creativity. The first was an individual differences approach (seen best in his test of creative thought). For example, people were asked to think of all the uses of a tin can and then their answers were scored for flexibility (number of different approaches/methods), fluency (total number of ideas), originality and elaboration, all of which come from Guilford’s (1956) ideas on creativity.
However, both Guilford and Torrance were aware that this approach to creativity was incomplete. Thinking about uses for a tin can doesn’t address larger parts of creativity such as redefining situations and being sensitive to problems in the world. Part of the redefinition of situations includes moving beyond functional fixedness (the idea that objects have only certain uses).
So Torrance utilized an ‘artistic definition’ task in which people gave analogies for the nature of creativity. One of these examples, from Martin, is the ‘cat listening’ definition. It seems to me that Kentaro’s cat listening is an example of going beyond functional fixedness. Instead of seeing the cat’s burial as a fixed schema, Kentaro used the burial as a chance to listen to the noises of the dead cat.
Amazing though Kentaro is, psychology was there first.
The personality sentences 