Richard Floridas The Rise of the Creative Class :: Architecture Design Essays

Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class gives a very interesting look into the science behind creativity and a thorough understanding of the creative process. According to Florida, creativity is a cognitive ability separate from other mental functions and all aspects related to intelligence. Creative potential does benefit from intelligence though but creativity is still a capacity inherent to all but in varying degrees for each person. Creativity requires self-assurance and the ability to take risks, however, because people utilizing creativity are usually going up against orthodox ideas about things and are challenging the norm and receiving a lot of criticism for these innovations. One must be sure of their self to maintain belief in their innovation through all this criticism and must be willing to take a risk in introducing their product of creativity to the market in the face of all this criticism. Florida claims there are four steps to the creative pr ocess. The first is preparation in which the person intently studies the task at hand getting a good grasp of the concept in their mind. The next step is incubation which is still a relatively unknown process of how this works in the mind but what is known is that one must consciously and subconsciously study the concept in their mind. The next step is illumination in which the person sees a new synthesis for this concept. The final step is verification or revision which include all work after the illumination step. I found it interesting that creativity is largely based on experiences and creativity favors people with an intellect with diverse experiences and perspectives because of this. This is because creativity requires the synthesis of different perspectives to create something new and useful. I also found it interesting that many highly creative environments in the past such as China and the Islamic world have died out because of social and economic conditions and thes e places now are not thought of as creative and intellectual centers anymore. I also found the concept of New Growth Theory to be very interesting in that it is essentially the empowerment of every person through the power of ideas and intellectual property although this theory seems slightly optimistic when it is compared to Karl Marx's goal of the proletariat overthrowing the upper classes.