“ 'Even kindergarten staff haven’t learned how to work purposefully with creativity. If you let children draw whatever they want, without any restrictions or objective, they’ll simply draw the same thing over and over again,' says Erik Lerdahl, Norway’s only professor of creativity. He works at Kristiania University College, mainly with students of design and communication.
“Lerdahl teaches his students to develop their creativity by giving them clear parameters for a task. For example, he might get his students to mold a piece of clay while it’s hidden under a black plastic sheet — to reduce their dependence on their sight — as a way of demonstrating how restrictions can be a source of creativity.
“ 'One approach many creative people use is to push themselves into a self-imposed crisis, which will in turn force new solutions to appear. But that requires courage, and it can be quite an uncomfortable experience; it feels safe and comfortable to arrive at something we’re already familiar with. On the other hand, to break with old patterns and familiar hypotheses is far more demanding. In Indian mythology, we have the god Shiva, who is the god of both destruction and creation. Destruction is part of the creative process. You have to be able to tear something down to build something new,' says Lerdahl.”
