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Creativity in the Digital Age

Written on

Feb 24, 2006 

Author

Craig Walmsley  |

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Creativity in the Digital Age

In the spring of 1978 a student named Dan Bricklin was watching his professor at Harvard Business School create a financial model on a blackboard. When the professor found an error or wanted to change a parameter, he had to tediously erase and rewrite a number of sequential entries in the table. Bricklin often spent his time daydreaming through class, occasionally considering the new computer technologies being developed by companies like Apple. Watching his professor laboriously change his calculations, Bricklin realized that he could easily replicate the process on a computer. By creating an ‘electronic spreadsheet’ which connected numbers with underlying formulae, you could automate the process of calculation and make managing mathematics considerably easier.

Bricklin built the program for the Apple II and, with the help of friends, launched it in 1979. It propelled the Apple from being a computer hobbyists’ toy to being a much-desired, very useful financial tool for business. This success in the business market then drew the attention of IBM who was swiftly motivated to enter the PC market, which they had, until then, been ignoring. The huge difference that the PC has made to the western world cannot be underestimated. An entire industry was propelled to incredible success through the innovation of one inspired, informed, and slightly geeky individual. The incident is far from isolated. Tim Berners-Lee took an offshoot of the military-industrial complex — a worldwide computer network, with its suitably militarily-industrial title “The Internet” — and, with a few simple concepts, turned it into the accessible, polymorphous and dynamic “World Wide Web” – through which the entire globe and communicate and transact.

In roughly the time since “Star Wars” was released, the way the world works, thinks and transacts has been revolutionized by technological innovation. In that same time the film business has barely moved on from the story-telling pattern set by “Star Wars” itself — a narrative revolution created by another inspired, informed and slightly geeky individual, George Lucas. As a matter of fact, the most significant innovations in film-making during this period have been the extension of the special effects tools to the digital realm by the same sort of inspired, informed and slightly geeky individuals that are building the technology revolution in the rest of the world. For example, Photoshop, the now industry standard image processing software, was created in part by John Knoll — a special effects maestro at George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic.

But whilst technological innovation continues at breakneck pace, and continues to significantly impact our day to day lives, those fields traditionally called “creative” have merely ridden on the coat-tails of technical change. Art, design, film, writing and reporting have all been radically changed by technology, but none have by themselves made leap and bound alterations in the last 30 years. Trends have come and gone, and great work has been done, but it is very difficult to point to any transformative “creativity” in any of these disciplines that has not been driven in one way or another by a new form of technology. Look, for example, at two high profile executions in the last few years. One of last years biggest viral ads was the “remix” of Gene Kelly’s Singing in the Rain for Volkswagen. Created by DDB London, the ad was only possible because of new technologies in digital imaging and manipulation. The runaway hit of 2004, “Subservient Chicken” from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, was really just a very simple interactive component tagged on to a previously planned “above the line” campaign.

Despite the title, the “creative” industries are not really as “creative” as they like to think. Technology, on the other hand, is just about the most creative medium in which anyone can work. Technologists create new ways to help people to find, buy, connect, share, inform, and excite. A software developer does not need to just tell stories — they can create new ways for people to do new and different things — new ways to access information, speak to friends, find and buy goods and services, listen to music, watch TV, read the news. The list, while certainly not endless, is very long indeed.