Illuminating the Illustration: Child of Bloom

"Child of Bloom" is a character illustration of one of my characters from my Angelborn universe.  In this piece she is a child, but in the universe the audience has the chance to see her grow up.  I've actually focused much of my recent attention on the children (some of my friends are very familiar with Gavin and Amanda) of her and James, an Angelborn or Demi-Angelus she is sworn to protect.  She was actually kidnapped by an angel from her normal human life to take on the role of an abdal, or a substitute.  This has given her special abilities and a period of immortality until she can complete her duties.

Read more to view the process of creating this illustration.

Deconstructing Creativity: Motivation

What is motivation?

In Teach for America’s Teaching as Leadership (TAL) Rubric, motivation is called “I want.”  In order to achieve or create, one must first want to achieve or create.  Games research points to motivation as something games are excellent at cultivating, therefore, the exploration of creativity, motivation, and games prior to building an early concept or project idea is essential.

First, for there are the obvious motivation breakdowns of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivations.  In my experience, the best creatives are primarily intrinsically motivated, as somehow the act of creating is motivating.  Reflecting with my adviser, I told her that there is something extremely gratifying about feeling and watching a creation take shape, then holding it in your hands and reflecting upon it once it has been birthed.  How does that motivation develop?  What is needed?  Why do have I had it over the course of my life and, say, my mother has developed it only since my graduation from high school (and its still a work in progress), and some folks never get there?  There are a couple of theories of motivation I will discuss here that seem to provide some level of explanation for this.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Perhaps one of the oldest theories of motivations Maslow's Hierarchy of Human needs, (1943) is a pyramid shaped view of what is required to be motivated.  At the first level are physiological needs (food, water, shelter), followed by safety, love, then self esteem and finally self actualization.  Creativity and creative acts fall into the top of this pyramid.  In particular, the issue of self esteem, broken into achievement, recognition, mastery, and respect seems vital to creating.

 

Deconstructing Creativity: Environment

For my masters project the area I want to explore is the intersection of creativity and games, a broad area, but one that allows me to touch on several areas of interest for future research.  Ultimately the project will have a much more narrow focus.  However, at this stage, I am general reflecting and researching in order to better understand what immediate research and design needs exist within emerging creativity studies.

To do this, involves deconstructing creativity, defining its elements so that I might be able to see what areas a game can build skill or confidence.  As it stands, "Creating" or "Synthesis" has long been at the top levels of Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain, being most recently moved to the very highest level.  This suggests that there are many processes and aspects to creativity to consider.

From "Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Domains"

If you look at the taxonomy, it is clear how many cogs in this domain are relevant to the creative process.  When considering creativity pedagogy or environments to encourage creativity, one must remember the level of cognition necessary, and the structure built up beneath it that allows success at creating.

To deconstruct from here results in a large number of relevant aspects of creativity: environment, motivation, process, and community being paramount.  However, to be more descriptive for the sake of exploring creativity further, I have broken those down into descriptive subsets:  Environment, Motivation, Process, Invention, Reflection, Exhibition.

 

Today I plan to focus on Environment, and explore each other area in depth at a later time.  There is a great deal of content to work with in the concept of a creative environment alone.

MSU Creativity Initiative

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend the MSU Creativity Initiative Kick Off.  This is an amazing new interdisciplinary project that has the potential to be interinstitutional as well as involving community partners (wonder how TFA could use empirical data on creativity and creative pedagogy).  As it centers around creative processes across disciplines, there is a potential for Serious Games to get in the mix

Overview:

Creativity Initiative Website
Twitter:  msu_creativity
Facebook Group: The Creativity Initiative

There is also a hash-tag list.  #msucreativity
This program is innovative.  They want it to be decentralized and act as a hub (which is why it is an initiative, not a center).  The areas of research are arranged in clusters, but these are not silos and collaboration and movement between clusters is both expected and encouraged.