Creativity

Definition

VIA: Creativity is the strength of thinking of novel and productive ways to conceptualize and do things — generating ideas or approaches that are original and useful, and includes but is not limited to artistic achievement.

Wikipedia: Creativity is the ability to generate novel and valuable ideas or works through the exercise of imagination, producing things as varied as scientific theories, literary works, musical compositions, inventions, and paintings.

Cambridge Dictionary: Creativity is the ability to produce or use original and unusual ideas.

Here’s the thing most people get wrong about creativity: they think it belongs only to painters, musicians, and writers. It doesn’t. The VIA Institute is clear that creativity is really about a way of thinking — divergent thinking, or the ability to come up with many different ways to solve the same problem. That means the kid who finds a clever workaround for a broken locker, the one who invents a new play in basketball, and the one who writes a song are all using the exact same strength.

Creativity has two non-negotiable ingredients: originality (the idea has to be new, at least to you) and usefulness (it actually has to work, or mean something, or solve something). A totally random idea that does nothing isn’t creative — it’s just random. That’s an important nuance, because a lot of teenagers assume creativity means “being weird” or “being random.” Real creativity is stranger and more disciplined than that: it’s original AND it works.

One more myth worth killing: creativity isn’t a fixed trait you either have or don’t. Research from the VIA Institute shows creativity can be built through practice — by deliberately trying new approaches, taking on unfamiliar challenges, and reflecting on what you tried. It’s a muscle, not a gift some people are born with and others aren’t.

Examples and Case Studies

Leonardo da Vinci treated art, anatomy, engineering, and flight as one connected playground of curiosity, sketching flying machines centuries before anyone could build one — proof that creativity thrives when you refuse to stay in one lane.

Ada Lovelace looked at Charles Babbage’s mechanical calculating machine in the 1840s and imagined something nobody else did: that it could be programmed to create art and music, not just crunch numbers. She’s now recognized as writing the first computer algorithm, over a century before computers existed as we know them.

Alexander Fleming noticed mold had killed the bacteria in a petri dish he’d almost thrown away. Instead of dismissing the mess, he asked why — and that creative curiosity led directly to penicillin, one of the most life-saving discoveries in history.

Jack Andraka was a 15-year-old who lost a family friend to pancreatic cancer and, frustrated that existing tests were slow and expensive, combined ideas from a biology article and a science class to invent a new, cheap test for the disease — while still in high school.

Gitanjali Rao was 11 when she read about lead contamination in Flint’s water supply and built a low-cost sensor called Tethys to detect it — she later became TIME’s first-ever Kid of the Year.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent the computer, the phone, or the mp3 player — his creativity was in reimagining how people could interact with technology that already existed, a reminder that creativity is often about connecting things, not conjuring them from nothing.

Suggested Track

A creativity-focused track works best when it treats creativity as a practice, not a personality trait. One approach is a “divergent thinking” format: each week, give participants one ordinary object or problem and challenge them to generate ten different uses or solutions before judging any of them — building the muscle of generating quantity before quality.

A second approach is a portfolio or “creative sampler” format: over several weeks, participants rotate through different creative mediums — visual art, music, writing, design, cooking, building — and reflect on which ones surprised them. This works well for teens who assume they’re “not creative” because they’ve only tried one medium and it didn’t click.

A third option blends both: start with divergent thinking exercises to loosen up assumptions about what counts as creative, then move into a longer project (a zine, a short film, an invention, a piece of music) where participants apply that flexible thinking to something they actually finish and share.

Literature, Art and Media

Books:

• Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert — a warm, practical case for living creatively without waiting for permission or perfect conditions.
• Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon — a short, visual guide built around the idea that all creative work builds on what came before it, which takes the pressure off “originality from nothing.”
• Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley and David Kelley — from the founders of design firm IDEO, arguing that creative confidence can be built like any other skill, through small wins and practice.
• Creativity: The Ultimate Teen Guide by Aryna Ryan — written specifically for teenagers, it dismantles the myths that block young people from seeing themselves as creative.

Visual Art:

• The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh — painted from memory and imagination rather than observation, it shows creativity as a way of transforming an ordinary view into something entirely new.
• The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí — its melting clocks are a masterclass in taking a familiar object and asking “what if it behaved completely differently?”

Podcasts:

• Creative Pep Talk — illustrator Andy J. Pizza breaks down the mindset and habits behind a sustainable creative practice, aimed at working artists but very accessible to beginners.
• Song Exploder — musicians deconstruct one song track-by-track, revealing the messy, iterative decisions behind something that sounds effortless once it’s finished.

TED Lectures:

• 4 lessons in creativity — Julie Burstein. Drawing on interviews with artists facing failure and self-doubt, it shows creativity as something built through challenge, not despite it.
• A powerful way to unleash your natural creativity — Tim Harford. Explains how history’s most creative people worked on multiple projects at once instead of forcing single-minded focus.
• Want to be more creative? Go for a walk — Marily Oppezzo. A fast, research-backed talk on a genuinely free tool for breaking creative blocks.
• Give yourself permission to be creative — Ethan Hawke. A personal, accessible case for why creative expression matters even if you’ll never be “the best” at it.

Movies:

• Dead Poets Society (1989) — a teacher pushes his students to think for themselves and find their own voice, in poetry and in life.
• Whiplash (2014) — an intense, uncomfortable look at the obsessive drive behind mastering a creative craft, and the cost that can come with it.
• Sing Street (2016) — a teenager in 1980s Dublin starts a band to impress a girl and discovers songwriting as a way to survive a hard home life.

Mentors

To be completed by program coordinator.

Events

Fringe Festivals — generally great events with wide ranging acts, often new and creative art.

Places

Art Galleries (traditional and contemporary)

Science / STEM centres such as Questacon (Canberra), Powerhouse Museum (Sydney) and Scitech (Perth)

Experiences

Keep a “bad idea” journal for two weeks — write down one deliberately terrible or impossible idea every day. This removes the fear of judgment that blocks most creative thinking, since nobody’s precious about ideas they know are bad.

Try a constraint challenge: make something (a drawing, a short story, a piece of music) using a strict limitation, like only three colours, fifty words, or one instrument. Constraints force original thinking because the obvious options are taken off the table.

Join or start a maker or craft group — pottery, woodworking, coding, cooking, sewing — anything hands-on. Physical creation builds creative confidence faster than abstract brainstorming because you get immediate, tangible feedback.

Do a remix project: take something that already exists — a fairy tale, a song, a recipe — and change one major element. This directly practices the “build on what exists” model of creativity, which is far more realistic than waiting for a completely original idea to strike.

Challenges

The Ten Uses Challenge

Pick one everyday object within arm’s reach — a paperclip, a shoe, a spoon. Set a timer for five minutes and write down ten different uses for it, other than its obvious one. Don’t judge any idea while you’re generating them; just keep the list moving.

• Once the timer’s up, circle the three ideas you like best.
• Pick one and actually try it out, even briefly.

The 24-Hour Constraint Project

Choose a creative medium (writing, drawing, music, video, cooking) and give yourself one strict constraint — a word limit, a colour limit, a single ingredient, a specific mood. Create something within 24 hours.

• Don’t aim for perfect. Aim for finished.
• Share it with one other person and ask what surprised them about it.

Steal and Remix

Find a story, song, or piece of art you admire. Identify the single element you like most about it (a plot twist, a chord progression, a colour palette). Make something new that borrows that one element but changes everything else.

• Notice how “borrowing” a starting point makes it easier to begin than starting from a blank page.

The Bad Idea Sprint

For seven days in a row, write down one deliberately bad, impossible, or ridiculous idea related to a problem you’re facing (school, a hobby, a friendship). At the end of the week, review the list.

• Look for any “bad” idea that has a small, workable piece hiding inside it.
• Notice how much easier it was to think freely once the pressure to be “good” was removed.