Creativity - no more in the ‘WANTED’ list of users

A couple of years back, at least, until then, people used to crave for products that exhibited massive lengths of creative approaches and instincts. From advertisements to assignments, from movies to mehendi, from food to fashion, creativity is what caught the beholder’s eye in every direction. (Oh! That, a little rhymed there, LOL!)

Anyways, back to reality - But just like how everything else has to reach its saturation level at some point during its steady race, I guess even ‘Creativity’ has had its list of hits, pretty much these recent times. Nowadays, the tag that creativity pulls along is pure lameness. You do anything with your stuff and voice it out, ‘I came out to do something creative, something contemporary...’ and the world believes it.

Just last year, I remember seeing my friend sporting a CREATIVE tattoo as she says it was, which looked no lesser than the capital alphabet S written in three different directions. Now from the visual perspective, unfortunately it also seemed to look like a Scorpio. So there you go, creativity has its chunk so what, even the artist can brag about his or her creative angle.

I stood in pride when I decided to owe one of my blogs to Creativity. Why I wanted to do that was because I considered that my respect to creativity was sequentially been portrayed via a poetic essence. But now as I write here, am apprehensive that I did that. Creativity is misinterpreted in today’s times in many ways, in terms of money, effort, resources, thinking, time and so much more that this space would be less to write of.

I soon will be taking that ‘creativity’ tag off, but I truly believe that good Creativity (I know that creativity in its right sense is always wild and wacky and that is exactly what I meant by ‘good creativity’!) still exists within each one of us but we are just not sure how to put it in the right way and more importantly, where it put it guys. And even more seriously, how the heck are we going to convince these takers about the ongoing value of thinking wild, thinking new, thinking exactly ‘critical’ in place and thinking for the good of all.

Being an Instructional Designer myself, I have been experiencing this dearth in the plains of varied thinking and high engagement for learners – the siblings of creativity, in the courses that I have been developing over the past few months. All thanks to the vicious cycles of project management and client requirements.

This is a case from my workplace a few months back. A client had recommended a world class gambling game to be the backdrop of an environmental social awareness based E-Learning program. The kind of analysis that goes into such courses is vast. It involves time, research extremes, and effort on understanding the game as well as the political hitches within the social awareness program for which the courses were being done.

After a few curves up and down, the clients were impressed with what we had proposed and done and the way it had been put together, as their needs were being served for the sophisticated, toughest genre of audiences like the CEOs, established entrepreneurs, MDs, founders and so on.

But after a long gap of silence from their end, we understood what held them back before they yielded in to being our eventual clients. COST…EFFORT…TIME - the C.E.T paradigm! So what would they have done to demolish this hurdle? Well, let’s compromise on creativity, that anyway had no value for money, it was simply value addition! So be it, we get back the project but the deal is just KEEP it Linear guys, as we don’t have much money to shed for what was that ‘out of the box’ stuff??? Oh Yeah! ‘Creativity’…

Well, the story doesn’t end here. What I simply don’t understand is why people have to apartheid creativity for the sake of business. Take the PR industry for example, I know firms that outdo their work when it comes to assignments in terms of thinking new but their profits go for a toss if the products or projects are enriched with creativity. Because as the one-liner goes, ‘A little too much of anything kills the originality in the good’. And you know what? All this has sprung by in the past few months.

Not desperate, not deprived but disappointed that people have stopped caring for what ‘Creativity’ was once for all of us. Don’t know how many out there are into doing business and don’t give a damn for those who think so fresh, so new, so creatively.

I know am creative enough and the people around me know that too, but my creativity has been getting rusted and ripped off over the past few months. Even the freelancers loathe projects that have too much of interactive signs and prefer the much old traditional approach of Linear learning. The only way I try to keep it alive is by writing poems.

The kind of creativity that I had for E-Learning courses is all buried momentarily, because nowadays clients look for projects that would reach them beholding lesser efforts, lesser thinking, straight-forward approaches, no scenarios, no critical thinking for learners, no engagement learning, no interactivity but more outputs at a quicker turnaround time with few or no interaction points and just plain text and graphics. (Oh Yeah, some don't even want animations..)

Times have changed! And I still look for those heart-warming, creativity yearning projects that come our way once a while, as I know that creative minds are still on a rage to do something new, something fresh and something totally out of the blue. Any one who has an anti-opinion on this perspective is free to voice theirs and guess what? I would love to hear it too! Because I always feel it is much brighter on the other side, but who really knows unless someone doesn’t say so?