Chapter 6 - Person: The Who of Creativity

Abstract

Chapter 6 moves on to study the impact of the Person on the process of creative and engineering problem solving. This is an area that is central to the study of creativity but is perhaps the area that is least familiar to engineers. The Person plays a three-fold role in creativity and creative problem solving. First, personal properties can foster or inhibit creativity. These include, for example, the individual’s willingness to take risks. Second, the person’s feelings and emotions constrain or enable her ability to be creative. Third, motivation plays a key role in how a person engages with the process of creativity. Most important of all, the personal qualities and traits that foster or inhibit creativity do so in different ways at different phases of the process. A quality that favors creativity at one stage may, in fact, inhibit creativity at a different point in the process.