Creativity is a driving force in human nature. We invent, we make, we try things out, and we seek the unexpected. However, we all know the challenges in regular life that force us to be habitual, conformist, and routine, maybe because of school or work or family life. How can you wear something different when all your mates think it's strange? How can you eat something different when there are dietary restrictions in your culture? Or how can you give something different to somebody when you're ill or unable to leave the house? Researcher Teresa Amabile says, "Creativity gets killed every day in the work environment, for good business reasons such as coordination, productivity, and control." Being creative does require an effort to overcome these constraints or at least to find a way to work within the constraints to be creative, not just for this class, but for your own personal creativity, to change yourselves and make yourselves more creative. It takes some courage to publicly express our creativity whether to one person or to many people. Amabile's component theory of creativity identifies three main areas of creativity; creative skills, expertise, and motivation. Creative skills is what we're working on in this course. Expertise is tactical, domain specific, procedural knowledge, and how our surroundings including our work structure, resources, and team, make it easier or harder to be creative. Importantly however, much of what we do as creatives is influenced by our own motivation. We may have the skills and the resources to be creative, but without motivation we will not be as creative as we could be. Research has shown that motivation is an extremely important element in being creative. It's generally accepted. There are two forms of creative motivation; external motivation and internal motivation. External motivation comes from the outside in the form of punishment or reward. You get paid or you could get a bonus at work, so you do well. You do poorly at school, you get punished with bad grades. These are examples of external motivation. They're the ones we hear about in the news and a lot of the time they seem to be the only way to get people to do almost anything like work harder or you get better grades or in our case, be more creative. Trouble is according to Daniel Pink in his book Drive, it doesn't work that way. First of all type X, or external motivation, tends to require more and more incentives to achieve the same result. Secondly, it actually decreases the quality of the efforts, specifically, decreases creative results. Amabile identified what she called, 'The intrinsic motivational principle of creativity,' and she says, "People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interests, satisfaction and challenge of the work itself and not by external pressures." In other words, you're being creative for yourself and for your own reasons and your on pleasure. This may mean you solve a challenge in a less efficient, more unusual, more interesting, and different way than the well-worn path of conformity. It's not just getting it done. That's one of the goals of the course, to try to develop habits and curiosity, to break out of a normal routines for reasons other than the direct reward. People that really want to do something completely different are less interested in the money and more the impact of their ideas and their efforts. Now, at the beginning of the course, I said that the only truly wrong answer is one answer. We all need to develop a wide range of ideas and answers. Of course, some of these ideas will be good, some will be bad, some will be wonderful and some will be really bad. The whole range of answers we develop however, is important in our quest for creativity. That awful answer just might give us the key to a breakthrough in another way. This also means that the unpredictability of creativity is valuable. If we're going to be creative, we may end up with something that doesn't work that isn't perfect or that isn't what we expected. That's the nature of creativity. Failure happens as part of the normal creative process. Remember the slogan of the design from [inaudible] says it best, "Fail early, fail often, from these failures, will find something new and interesting and possibly life-changing."