TRANSFORMATIONAL CREATIVIY
Learning for a Better Future
Transformational Creativity Creativity—the production of ideas that are both novel and useful or effective—has brought the world Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Rodin’s The Thinker, Hugo’s Les Misérables, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the printing press, the cell phone, the airplane, the Eiffel Tower, and the United States Constitution (and the constitutions of other countries as well). It would be hard to overstate the importance of creativity to the cultural evolution of humankind. And yet … creativity also has brought us Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (a Nazi propaganda flm), the hydrogen bomb, untraceable 3-D printed guns, killer drones, carefully designed gambling casinos that keep people gambling long after they should have walked out, heroin, cigarette advertisements, and factories, creating industrial products, that dumped toxic waste into public bodies of water. By the mid-1980s, it was already clear to creativity researchers that creativity had a dark side. There had been the threats of nuclear devastation; Nazi, Communist, and in the U.S., McCarthyite propaganda; and drugs such as thalidomide, brought to market with great fanfare only to be found to be highly toxic, in this case, to the unborn. But all that was before the Age of the Internet. Today we live in an Age of the Internet. It is not clear where the enormous creativity that has gone into the development of the software for its construction and maintenance, and the hardware that allows it, will bring us. The Internet has brought us many advantages in terms of availability of information and retrievability even of obscure facts. But will social media mean the end of democracy? Will people become like laboratory animals, responding to clickbait in much the way white rats respond to sugar pellets? Will terrorists use the Dark Web to plot the overthrow of stable governments? Are they already doing so? Will new designer drugs ever designed to elude regulations lead more and more people to become like the opium smokers of times past?