Creativity

This creativity self-assesment developed by CREAX asks a series of questions and provides a score on 8 different axes: Persistence, Connection, Perspective, Abstraction, Curiosity, Boldness, Paradox, and Complexity.

• Abstraction: The ability to abstract concepts from ideas.
• Connection: The ability to make a connection between things that don't initially have an apparent connection.
• Perspective: The ability to shift one's perspective on a situation — in terms of space and time, and other people.
• Curiosity: The desire to change or improve things that everyone else accepts as the norm.
• Boldness: The confidence to push boundaries beyond accepted conventions. Also the ability to eliminate fear of what others think of you.
• Paradox: The ability to simultaneously accept and work with statements that are contradictory.
• Complexity: The ability to carry large quantities of information and be able to manipulate and manage the relationships between such information.
• Persistence: The ability to force oneself to keep trying to derive more and stronger solutions even when the good ones have already been generated.

As applied to the practice of User Experience Design, many of these qualities are essential. It takes boldness on the part of the designer to visualize solutions. That fearlessness frees one up to focus on the process, rather than on what others are thinking of you. The ability to see connections between things is important, because connections are one's own work of creation. Grasping large, complex bodies of information and seeing relationships between them is crucial in order to see the big picture; one's breadth of understanding goes a long way toward solving problems.