Definition of Aesthetics of Creativity

What are Aesthetics of Creativity?

Aesthetics is what we can sense and how we sense. Aesthetics is our most “basic” way of being alive. It involves both how and what we sense – and how we come to “comport” ourselves.  It is the way we describe and understand our historical forms of sense-making. 

In any historical mode of sense-making, there are profoundly felt moments of discomfort, disruption, and absurdity – and there are also sensations of how we practice in our everyday lives pulling difference back towards existing norms – our normative comportment.

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In creative experimentation – negative sensations are potential cues to novel pathways worth exploring. Blocking is a negative act that is experienced negatively. And this experience of perplexity, horror, wonder, disgust, frustration, stupidity, and boredom – are the critical sense-making cues that need to be actively and experimentally explored in ways that are enabling and generative of qualitative differences.

Further reading: Innovation: Sense Making and Aesthetics