A 1960s art school experiment that redefined creativity

4/30/2026 at 5:26:31 PM

I was always told that the difference between art and design is that the artist creates the problem, and the designers solve them.

I thought it followed the Socrates tradition in that the true philosopher is the one asking the questions, and it is the role of the student to answer them.

I wish I remembered who I am quoting here

by uxhacker

4/30/2026 at 5:58:21 PM

I wish ancient Greek techne τέχνη hadn't gone through the split that left "art" on one side and "technology" (or work?) on the other.

The split of art vs. design you're talking about or one of the many ways to divide the act of creation into a classical/romantic divide or one of the many other ways to describe it should be considered harmful.

And I'm not trying to split hairs here but wishing the dichotomy you're talking about didn't exist and encouraging folks not to frame the world that way.

by colechristensen

4/30/2026 at 6:34:46 PM

Where is the harm? You can be in both worlds at the same time.

If we think of Leonardo da Vinci he created both art that created problems, and inventions that solved problems. But these world where very separate.

by uxhacker

4/30/2026 at 7:48:15 PM

Your mental models of the world are reflected in how you interact with it.

If you have an idea that there's a split between "creating beautiful stuff" and "creating useful stuff" then your world turns into one where something is only one or the other where someone creating only does one or the other.

These days it's thought of unique or special if something is both and the fact this isn't standard is influenced by the mental model of them being separate.

by colechristensen

5/1/2026 at 1:08:11 AM

I understand where you’re coming from. I differ from this view. I think we can hold a dialectical view. We can recognise art that raises questions or creates problems, while also recognising design or technology that solves problems.

Human progress depends on both: defining the problem and solving it.

by uxhacker

4/30/2026 at 8:48:12 PM

Moreover the people who create useful things don't often take the time to try to make them beautiful, with the result that everything is a utilitarian grey box with some buttons on it.

by throwway120385

5/1/2026 at 4:01:58 PM

But that worldview excludes art that solves problems and inventions that create them.

by kbelder

4/30/2026 at 9:07:29 PM

To echo your point, there is no "art" at all without "technology"; from cave paintings, paint tubes, to digital tablets...

by woolion

5/1/2026 at 1:13:07 AM

Is that true? I think for it to he true we'd have to overly abstract the definition of technology to the point of uselessness.

You can draw images in the sand. Is a stick "technology"? What about using your finger?

Do we need paints? There are natural dyes. I don't mean in the sense of extracting things but some are as simple as "smash this berry". I believe the answer to this is rather critical since you specifically mention cave paintings. Many of those were done by hand, not by brush.

What about things like rock balancing? Sand sculptures? Singing/vocal instruments? Poetry (spoken, not written)? Story telling (ditto)? And so on

There is so much we consider art that can be done by any human with no tool use nor any external objects. I won't even mention how people call a sunset a work of art, and I do think we should avoid that as it has the same problem I bring up with defining technology. But I do not think most people would consider speech or vocal sounds technology, though certainly we would include things like writing.

by godelski

5/1/2026 at 3:15:54 AM

You strengthen my point about τέχνη.

It takes a considerable amount of development before you can make the distinction at all between separate concepts of art and technology. For a long time there wasn't a split because it was difficult to conceptualize how to split the two.

by colechristensen

5/1/2026 at 2:56:51 PM

I find many software developers are solution-oriented instead of problem-oriented. Because that's a common theme in my head it's what I see here, whether that's what was intended or not.

I believe that developers who orient their thinking/work around the problem they're solving instead of the solution they're implementing generally have a better outcome.

I wonder if that's what was happening with the artists in the study? The "successful" artists were really focusing on what they were trying to achieve, putting their time and attention into that?

(But then this ties into other comments here about the criteria for success. Maybe success in software problem solving doesn't correlate that well with success as an artist. I think success as an artist comes down to being considered an artist by the artist gatekeepers, who are some combination of other artists and people who fund artists.)

by redsparrow

4/30/2026 at 9:55:40 PM

In my days in art academy, the running joke was that

    If you were accepted into the painting faculty, you were an artist,
    If you were accepted into graphics faculty, you were color-blind,
    If you were accepted into sculpture, you were blind,
    If you were accepted into art history, you couldn't be taught to draw.

While a little cruel... (I was in the graphics), the general idea was to say that art theory, art history, and especially psychology studies around art are absolute rubbish. These people seem to get into their line of work because they failed as artists (and don't understand / can't produce art).

Likewise, in this article, the approach to defining creative thinking is... so simplistic, and the test is so irrelevant...

Just to try to give you some background as to why a student could choose one approach or the other: if a student wasn't told why they need to draw a still life, they probably didn't care much for the outcome either. Artists rarely know why they prefer one composition over the other, especially in academic studies like... still life. To an artist, the selection of objects for a still life is really arbitrary, their arrangement is arbitrary -- it makes no difference. To make an interesting still life, one would have to find something that would interest other artists in it. Like, for example, how one can show different textures of the objects of the same nominal color using color? Or... would a technique that models volume through the thickness / intensity of contours work on mostly round objects? And so on.

Later, the article is trying to assess the artist's accomplishments in ways artists would frown upon. The number of exhibitions? The sales in prestigious galleries? Yeah... as a student I spent some time working in the lab of Kadishman (the guy who draws the same sheep over and over, and then sells it for insane $$). The "master" doesn't even draw the sheep anymore. It's all Shinkar / Bezalel students who do it :D And, honestly, the sheep is one of the biggest frauds I've personally witnessed in this profession (there are, of course, things like the diamond skull from Damien Hirst, which are more expensive because of the materials used, but I didn't have a chance to behold the miracle with my own eyes).

by crabbone

4/30/2026 at 8:04:09 PM

I'm struggling to understand what they define "problem finding" to be in this context, did anyone come away with a more concrete definition?

by gh0stcat

4/30/2026 at 8:29:05 PM

No.

Here's one interpretation though, for the discourse:

When given a task, some artists focused less on the objective and more on the process of observation. Observation of what, would be a logical next question. And I have to imagine and indulge in some projection here and guess that any of the artists may have been looking for more of a challenge, or more meaning. How to select some combination of objects, relative to the constraints of the circumstances for the task, paired with the skills they possess to produce the task at hand.

Given the proper acumen and a relatively subordinate task, I imagine some would tend towards Parkinson's law.

So following this, maybe problem finding could be seen as: how is this beautiful/aesthetically pleasing, or what do I really want to compose to fulfill this demand? What innate qualities do these things have which express some quality? Or maybe: how can I waste an hour of this man's time?

YMMV

by reg_dunlop

4/30/2026 at 9:37:39 PM

> And I have to imagine and indulge in some projection here and guess that any of the artists may have been looking for more of a challenge, or more meaning

I think one reason it may be so difficult to express this concretely, is that artists are often looking for an ineffable quality.

by squidsoup

5/1/2026 at 1:50:31 AM

I took it to mean their process was more divergent than convergent. They explored some branches, felt one had life, or tension, and then unfolded from there.

by sno6

5/1/2026 at 3:54:02 AM

My first answer was disingenuous, so here's another interpretation.

I didn't see a definition in the article, however I was reading Edgar Payne's Compostion of Outdoor Painting after reading your comment, and I was surprised to find the book talked about problem finding.

"Art is the art of disguising art". This means artists have to make a representation of a material object while obscuring all the rules and principles required to make the representation.

The problem is: how to make art without making it blatantly obvious it was an effort to make?

by reg_dunlop

4/30/2026 at 9:16:37 PM

I program and project manage games, I am certainly a problem solver on the team, and I definitely view the artists as problem creators. They will make everything harder for everyone else, but it's cus they are just 100% focused on the art, they want the art to be as good as possible and to realize their vision, so having them on the team means a lot more work in general but a far better looking game.

by everyone

4/30/2026 at 5:44:55 PM

Am I right in saying the conclusion of the experiment was: people who spend more time thinking about a problem before acting tend to find it more engaging and were therefore more successful?

I wonder if the quality of the art suffered within the context of the experiment because of the time constraint, even if in the long run those people tended to create better art.

by arlobish

4/30/2026 at 6:01:03 PM

No. People who are confronted with a task that don't search for a solution but for a priblem within it are more creative. The consequence was that some barely produced solutions within the time constraint. Those were more succesfull as artists, the article states, while a quite a few of the other folks dropped out of art. Consequentially I'd like to add: They found the solution to the problem of living as an artist in quitting art - quite reasonably

by NonHyloMorph

4/30/2026 at 8:19:36 PM

This is the conclusion of the article (and presumably the researchers) but I don't think it necessarily follows.

It seems to me equally plausible that one group were more interested in the craft of an accurate depiction, while the other was more interested in the arrangement of a pleasing aesthetic - both could be considered "solutions" to the given task.

by rainingmonkey

4/30/2026 at 8:27:09 PM

That experiment might simply divide artists into those who understand bullshit assignments and can adapt to that context, and those who don't and can't.

There are plenty of artists who can do well on SATs, and can fill out bureaucratic forms, and complete one-hour timed tests. They might well take a lot of time to think and explore when they are making their own art on their own schedule.

But I know artists who just can't function well under artificial constraints and can't adapt well to someone else telling them how to create art.

by 7402

4/30/2026 at 4:53:52 PM

This whole thing strikes me as coming from the wrong direction. Tying artistic and financial success, trying to apply some cargo cult "problem" engineering mentality to art. I feel like these articles illustrate quite well why the academic plastic arts have become so irrelevant today that we could say they are not part of human culture at large, in the sense that they have vanishing influence on public discourse.

by lkm0

5/1/2026 at 2:15:39 AM

> Tying artistic and financial success [...]

If you're referring to the article's description of the study's measure of success, the metrics had little to nothing to do with direct financial gain.

> [...] in the sense that they have vanishing influence on public discourse.

Nothing inherently requires art to be a part of the public discourse. Sometimes artists create art for art's sake, and/or just to make a buck. Sure, occasionally some art makes it big in the public eye and becomes part of the zeitgeist, but the vast majority of art barely sees the light of day.

by kmoser

5/1/2026 at 8:52:48 AM

The article, to me, comes across as focused on art as a job, especially sentences like "greater creativity and success in creative careers". There's a ring of self-help/pop business that just strikes me as artless.

> Nothing inherently requires art

Of course not: I've used academic in the precise sense of people deciding to go through the institutions of art, and coming out with a noticeable lack of tasteful intelligence. Is art education just a quest for social self-realization? is it a sinecure for the happy few? That I have no idea illustrates the point.

by lkm0

4/30/2026 at 6:00:30 PM

Interestingly, most of scientific research is also not part of the public discourse.

by smokel

4/30/2026 at 6:31:57 PM

Yes, that's a failing of science. Reading the early volumes of Nature from the 19th century shows how much more of an open dialogue it was back then: https://www.nature.com/nature/volumes

Though education was much more limited, so take "open" with a grain of salt.

by lkm0

4/30/2026 at 7:18:41 PM

I think the difficulty is we know vastly more, and have experimented with vastly more since the 19th century, that the majority of university learning these days, and the inherent challenge within that learning, is "how do we condense 200+ years of investigation, experimentation, and knowledge building into only a handful of years of learning?"

For a lot of sciences, we are very lucky that it is still possible. But the reason why scientists do not allow such an open dialogue with laypeople is because the majority of answers are going to boil down to either "that question doesn't make any sense, and i would have to spend the entire rest of the session teaching you why" or "we already did these experiments a bunch of times in the last hundred years, and found out the result, but the result is tricky because of so and so mitigating factors, and for me to explain these results and how to even interpret them in the first place (e.g. explaining how it was measured, explaining the theory behind why we chose that method to measure it, explaining what the numbers we get mean, etc.) would take the entire rest of the session"

And then of course, there's the frequent crackpots. Pretty much anyone within a science discipline who is even decently well known, especially if they're in physics, gets multiple emails a day from crackpots about how their theories are going to "totally blow a hole in the established knowledge", and at some point you hit a point where you're stuck between "spending 4 hours drafting a response to someone who has not bothered to put in the time to learn physics, and wouldn't listen to you anyway because they think they know it all", and "getting actual work done in your field". The scientists I know do take time out of their day to answer actual questions from inquisitive folk, but the difficulty is that thanks to the addition of ChatGPT, those questions are getting more and more cramped out by the crackpots armed with a hallucinating dictionary.

by fao_

4/30/2026 at 8:00:06 PM

Certainly, I'm also aware of how difficult it is to implement open dialogue in practice. Perhaps my hope is that general education could help develop that sort of transversal insight that talented scientists use to naturally understand topics which they are not familiar with, by working with analogies and fundamental principles. I know that knowledge of the nitty gritty generally requires years of actually struggling with the thing, and this cannot be asked of any layman. Still, for example, I'm thinking of times when you deal with a topic that is nominally in the same field as yours, but that is so foreign that the only knowledge relevant to it is something barely above undergraduate, say Newton's laws or thermodynamics. Many scientists have managed to either take some lessons from other fields and bring them into theirs, or contribute despite their relative lack of education in that subfield.

I'd like to believe there is a sort of education that allows people not to understand details, but at least to be able to get the rough shape of the topic at hand and shape their ideas in a way that benefits the other party. Perhaps this is just a matter of language and shouldn't need so much more education than the basics and curiosity. Or perhaps it's a pipe dream.

As for the crackpots, well, I know some people spend time and energy with them, but it is hard to believe their true objective is learning or contributing. It is, fortunately, very obvious when you meet one in the wild.

by lkm0

5/1/2026 at 10:02:49 AM

> I'd like to believe there is a sort of education that allows people not to understand details, but at least to be able to get the rough shape of the topic at hand and shape their ideas in a way that benefits the other party. Perhaps this is just a matter of language and shouldn't need so much more education than the basics and curiosity. Or perhaps it's a pipe dream.

Oh absolutely, I think that people in STEM should receive at least a cursory education in the Arts, and likewise I think people in the Arts should receive at least a cursory education in STEM. It doesn't have to be detailed, but it would be cool to have cross-disciplinary collaboration introduced into the higher learning ecosystem!

An issue I've consistently seen is STEM professionals musing in their own time about Sociology and Psychology, and their musings are almost always wrong — there's this arrogance to it where they think that instead of reading a book on Sociology 101, they think that they can reason about it from first principles, or computational principles. It used to happen a lot in spaces I occupied (notably, the community around 100 rabbits were incredibly fond of this), and I kept interjecting, like- no people have done studies on this, yes they are rigorous studies, this has been investigated in detail for about a hundred years and the answer to all your questions are literally answered in an introductory book on the subject.

Despite that, they used to just ignore me, and instead preferred to muddle on with this broken, strange understanding of the topic. You can see the same kind of strange mix of arrogance and intelligence within the Less Wrong community as a whole. Rational Wiki has a very good page somewhere that covers a number of their efforts to break into other fields, and how, without a willingness to open their minds and submit themselves to the knowledge of others, they have found their ideas and ventures broken in some fundamental way, without understanding why.

I think that without said cross-disciplinary education, there's a risk of CS professionals not understanding how deep and vastly more complex other STEM fields are (CS is entirely human constructions, Molecular Biology however deals with the very messy reality of evolution throwing things at the wall for four billion years). Some of the most notable and influential individuals in Computer Science have initially studied under non-CS fields (Alan Kay, David Knight, Larry Wall), and you can see very clearly (or at least, it feels very clear to me) how this has influenced their work within CS in very positive ways. Learning of ideas that are new and different to your native field of study seem to encourage a kind of creativity that many are searching for. So it seems a complete and utter shame that more people aren't willing to find humility and wide-eyed glee at the prospect of learning other fields from undergraduate material up.

by fao_

4/30/2026 at 8:19:08 PM

> And then of course, there's the frequent crackpots. Pretty much anyone within a science discipline who is even decently well known, especially if they're in physics, gets multiple emails a day from crackpots about how their theories are going to "totally blow a hole in the established knowledge"

I think at this point most of these people talk to chatbots instead, anecdotally the crank flow seems to have lessened.

by SiempreViernes

4/30/2026 at 11:22:18 PM

Yes, until they send over an AI hallucinated manifesto which is 100x longer than the email would have been.

by SauntSolaire

5/2/2026 at 10:02:42 AM

I think the comparison is tough because of specialization. There are a few areas of science I have an amateur interest in but adjacent areas under the same umbrella don't interest me because because I haven't done any work to understand the area. The surface of science is so vast now that a general discussion on any specific area is bound to lose almost the entire audience.

by senexes

4/30/2026 at 9:19:58 PM

I mean it's so advanced and esoteric.. we've been "digging" for centuries, the journey to the current coal face where new work is being done is so long you need a phd just to reach it.

by everyone