In Creativity we Trust
Planet Earth, 2022:
Pressing structural issues like climate change and income inequality have challenged the way we think about our individual lives and habits. They have also led us to rethink and start re-designing our collective socioeconomic systems.
At the forefront of this transition, stands the ancient driver of social progress, technology. However, as crisis after crisis, brings to the surface the real and painful deficiencies of our current social, economic and political choices, a deeply embedded misconception of technology’s power can be identified in our collective consciousness.
Clinging to our obsolete definition of growth, we refuse to let go of the outdated, utopian and ultimately counter-productive notion that the practical application of scientific knowledge will forever enhance our ability to develop and evolve as a species. Technology is being presented as the all-encompassing enabler of ‘business as usual’, a panacea for all the rising social and environmental issues that rapidly mount up to serious existential threats.
So, as the pace of events seems to overpass the rate of change, crisis management and damage control are normalised, branded and commonly accepted as ‘solutions’. Our collective force seems to suffer from serious time lags. This slow reaction time is largely correlated to the fact that resources are just not enough. Scarcity is only becoming worse. More and more consensus is being built around a simple yet painful truth: individuals, organisations and societies need to learn how to do more with what they have, or even less.
This realisation denotes to the value of ‘creativity’, a concept that has always proven key in getting us out of trouble. There are various historical periods associated with significant creative activity and development of our understanding. The Renaissance with an explosion of ideas associated with the interactions of diverse disciplines and investment. The Industrial Revolution leveraging the advantages of production and concentration of resource. The 20th century with increased understanding emerging from domains such as psychology and neuroscience, and of course the 21st century where we have seen great strides in automated and augmented creativity and data mining and AI.
As everybody needs to learn how to do more with less, it is not empty promises of technological miracles that will allow us to emigrate to a new planet or create something out of nothing that we need. Our future as a species depends on our capacity to generate new ideas by combining, changing or reapplying existing ones.
Adobe, reports that 50% of opportunities in the job market cite creativity as a necessary skill, while WEF predicts that “creativity, originality and initiative” is the number-three in-demand skill predicted for 2022.
These statistics imply that as even professional, high-skilled tasks are optimised by automation and AI, the value of creativity is not confined to the creative and cultural sectors but also becoming essential in the white-collar, service industries.
Creativity does not only serve as a unique source of competitive advantage, like your UX/UI analysts being better than your competitors or that your graphic designer has a rich portfolio. Creativity starts to pertain more and more to efficient and effective problem-solving.
And where is problem-solving more critical than when it comes to dealing with complex and global issues like the recent pandemic or climate change? Arguably, data-driven policy-making has proven insufficient to provide a holistic, operative and actionable framework by itself. The scientific experts and the technocrats of this world need to collaborate with and be complemented by creative minds. Together they can turn data into insights, and insights into measures. Measures that will solve problems given what we have, not just what a new technology can provide.
And as the business world is flooding with ambitious entrepreneurs, some more sincere than others, sustainability becomes an empty word to frame the old same story of opportunistic profit-seeking commercial activity as purpose-driven and morally founded.
As these ‘new ‘products, create new needs, the world’s trajectory doesn’t seem to change. Creativity is being strangled into framing the old as new as to check all the boxes of trends and buzzwords.
