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The Smithsonian Institution   Washington, D.C.  20560   (202) 357-3030

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Resident Associate Program

Creativity Seminar.  April 16, 1988

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER FOR SYMPOSIUM SESSION

Wilton Dillon, Director of the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Smithsonian Institution, who will moderate the 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. symposium session, composed questions for participants in a symposium he conducted last autumn.  You might like to consider those following as you contemplate your brief (10-15 minutes) symposium presentation.

1)  What place have humor, caprice or surprise in your work?

2)  What other human endeavors or disciplines have informed your creative work?

3)  In what earlier periods of civilization would you have enjoyed working?

4)  How do the new technologies (or materials) influence your creative work?

5)  If the arts and sciences spring from the play impulse in mammals (the proposition of Alfred Kroeber, the late Berkeley anthropologist), how are they alike and how do they differ?

6)  What place have hard work and discipline in creativity, play or inventiveness?

7)  Has leisure any real influence on your creativity?  Do you work well under pressure?  Do you prefer solitude or the stimulus and support of others?

8)  What are some significant questions you think should be asked about the creative process and/or problem solving?
9)  Whom do you regard as creative in fields other than your own?  Whom do you admire?

10)  Which creative artist would you like to read or see a play about?

11)  What could or should be done to encourage creativity in children?  How can curiosity be kept alive throughout the whole life cycle?

12)  How, by design or by chance, have you solved a problem or started a new path of inquiry?