Are Geeks "Creative"?

A colleague pointed me at an interesting discussion the other day about whether geeks are actually "creative". It comes partly from a recent post by Ian Betteridge that rails against the claims that App Inventor, which is designed to encourage development of simple programs for Android, "enables people to be creative and not just passive consumers". However, what he doesn't explore is the real meaning of the word "creative" in today's terminology.

OK, so the dictionary defines "creative" as meaning "producing or using original and unusual ideas", with synonyms such as "original", "imaginative", "innovative", "artistic", and "inspired". These seem fine if you are talking about someone producing a stunning work of art in Corel Painter, or some spectacular new soundtrack using Roland Cakewalk. But nobody knocked up this software using a utility such as App Inventor. Instead it was created by a team of engineers working to fine tolerances and requiring a deep knowledge of the subject and technologies. Dare I say, "geeks"?

Looking at most Web sites, social network pages, online photo albums, TV programs, and magazine adverts, or listening to a large proportion of recently recorded music, it's hard to find much in the way of material you could even charitably describe as "original" or "innovative". Even computer applications seem mostly to be evolution rather than "inspired". How many word processors or virus scanners have you seen that you can actually say are "innovative", and when did you last install a program that was truly "original"? Maybe, as today's focus seems to be all about style (generally over content) you could perhaps ascribe the term "artistic" to many of these things - but even that rather stretches the imagination in the majority of cases.

However, according to my thesaurus, "creative" also spawns synonyms such as "inventive", "resourceful", "ingenious", and even "productive". So your modern word processor, spreadsheet, photo editing tools, and more - with their clever "automatic everything" and powerful Wizards for anything more complicated than typing a sentence - would fit well with this definition of creativity. Though, personally, I feel that equating creativity with productivity rather stretches the point. If I can type fast, I'm more productive. But the result often isn't creative in terms of the content.

I suppose, as a geek, I don't really want to be "artistic", or even "original", anyway. I'd like to be "productive", "inventive", and possibly "ingenious". I want what I build to be architecturally robust using tried and trusted techniques and proven technologies, and I'm happy to leave it to the UI designers to inject the artistic stuff. And, as I've never been on a creative writing course, I assume that what I do most days here at p&p is more about being technically accurate and informative rather than relying on artistic license (unlike my blogs posts).

Ian also suggests that we geeks no longer rule the universe, and that our era is over. Yet, without us, none of this creative stuff would exist - and the world would be very different. I can't see anyone using App Inventor or similar utilities to implement the software that controls a nuclear power station, or powers communications satellites. And I doubt that most corporate and financial data centers rely on programs written by a media analyst or a fashion designer. Was the O/S for the Android (or even App Inventor itself) written by a social communities coordinator or a society wedding planner? I don't think so. Geeks still do, and always will, shape our world. OK, so it doesn't look very pretty when we've finished with it, but we just hire in a creative artist to make the UI look nice afterwards.

But I guess where all this is going is that - today - the word "creative" actually has negative overtones in many scenarios. In a previous life as a salesman, I could almost guarantee that my manager's response to reading my monthly sales report would be to praise my creativity...

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 01, 2010
  Actually I think the answer is a resounding yes, geeks are creative. In fact I cannot name a single geek that I know who isn't creative. Of course I could be biased being a geek myself : )In my sphere of work there are no negative overtones to the word "creative" but I do dislike the way that the word has been adopted to relate to fraud as in "creative accounting" or the massaging of statistics.Great post
• Anonymous
  August 01, 2010
  Thanks Kittie. Yes, "creative accounting" is a perfect example. Perhaps it reflects the growing use in our society of sarcasm - for which I'm often, it seems, a contributor.