People are biased against creative ideas, studies find

Cornell Chronicle Online ^ | Aug 25, 2011 | Mary Catt

[MortMan]

Creativity creates discomfort when the leap of logic required to understand it isn’t bridged by the creative thinker for his audience, IMO. Familiarity breeds comfort.

[ponygirl]

Early 90's.

The thing about a group crit is that if someone has a personal vendetta, it's usually pretty apparent... and the bad side to that is that the person you attack is also going to get a turn at your work, so it's kind of pointless to approach it in that way. At the school I attended, we were told from the very beginning to get over emotional attachments to the work, because at some point you were going to get your feelings hurt. If you couldn't stand up in front of everyone and justify every element in your design, from typeface selection to color to composition to production...you were just asking to get trashed. It's different in an art program, because a lot of times your reasoning for an artistic decision boils down to "I felt like it." That won't usually fly in a design program and the students who had a problem with it were those who either belonged in an art program, or, like someone else here mentioned, had some narcissistic tendencies and just thought their crap was great while others could see it was just crap.

I took this one drawing class taught by a woman who was considered a bit of a hardass. There were all sorts of rumors about how she would tear student work off the wall during a crit and rip it up in front of them. Everyone was terrified of this woman, mostly due to the rumors and stories passed along from former students. But I actually did see her do exactly that in our final project critique. This one guy who skipped class all the time showed up for the final, which was supposed to be 5 complete charcoals. Most people in the class had spent weeks working on their final drawings. This guy showed up and you could tell he sketched this stuff up the night before. (Dude was famous for this sort of thing. He was in another of my classes and on more than one occasion had pinned crap to the wall and then tried to BS his way through it.) When we got to his work, the prof asked everyone for their opinions and people were sort of quiet. No one was willing to say, "I think you spent five minutes on this." (I think one guy said something like, "This seems a little...incomplete...") After people danced around it for a while, she strolled nonchalantly up to the board, tore the guy's work off the wall (not in an angry way, just in a very deliberate way), ripped it all in half, and handed it back to the guy with the words, "You are wasting our time." Then she moved on to the next project, leaving him sitting there with his torn paper, totally stunned. The rest of us were thrilled because we had seen this guy do this more than once, but this was the first professor who had finally given him the treatment he deserved.

[reformedliberal]

We had those sorts of profs back in the day, too, as well as that type of student.

My husband and I did graphic design for several years, pre-computer. You do what the client wants. And it _is_ *work product*, not *art*. The most often heard phrase was “Don’t get too creative.”

Creativity is unsettling. Not what anyone wants associated with their business image. So, you end being subtly creative to satisfy yourself and the client. At some point, if all you are allowed to do is hack work, you find something else.