Perceptual Theories: Ernest Schachtel

To seriously study creativity, it is useful to know something about the first scientific efforts to define and explain it, attributable to psychology.

  1. Step 1: Small doses...visuals!

    The idiosyncrasies, concepts and language of mechanical engineering are somewhat distant from the psychological approach and it is easy for the reader to lose the thread of the explanations by becoming entangled with its specific terminology and its forms of expression.

    For this reason, I have preferred to extract small fragments of the theories of creativity and make an effort to create my own graphic image for them.

    My graphics involve the risk of biasing and/or distorting the original ideas, which also exists when trying to paraphrase them, but it brings the will to understand them and translate them into engineering language in the hope of bringing both approaches closer together.

    To this end, I have relied on research works that compile and summarize these theories. In particular, the work of authors Busse & Mansfield that appears in the quotes in the next step of the tutorial.

  2. Step 2: Perceptual Theories: Ernest Schachtel

    Busse & Mansfield (p. 50) cite that of Ernest Schachtel (Metamorphosis, 1959) as a perceptual theory. He maintains that the need to relate to the outside world forces interest and perceptual openness that allows us to observe it again and again from different perspectives, and therein lies a motivation for creativity. He illustrates himself with a personal analogy about “the reflection of the moon.”


    References:

    • Busse, T. V., & Mansfield, R. S. (1984). Teorías del proceso creador: revisión y perspectiva. (©. 2.-2. reservados, Ed.) Studies in Psychology = Estudios de Psicología, nº 18 (traducido del Journal of Creative Behavior, num. 2, vol. 14, 91-103, 1980), 47-57. Recuperado el 18 de diciembre de 2020, de https://dialnet.unirioja.es/ejemplar/7049
    • Schachtel, E. G. (1959). Metamorphosis. Nueva York: Basic Books.


  3. Step 3: My graphic interpretation

    Perceptual Theory: Ernest Schachtel (1959)

    Note. Where does the reflection of the moon point?: different observers perceive that it points towards them while the rest remains in darkness. Composing your looks is closer to reality: the reflection is in all directions and illuminates everyone equally. Source: illustration by the author.


    Reference: all texts and images in this tutorial were extracted from the doctoral thesis cited below,

    • Valderrey, M.E. (2021), “Catalizadores Creativos en Ingeniería Conceptual: Evaluación de Habilidades Visuales y Verbales para Diseño Mecánico”. Propuesta de tesis doctoral, UNINI-México.






  4. Step 4: Links

    This tutorial comes from:

    Associative Theories: Sarnoff Mednick

    and continues in:

    Humanistic Theories: Carl Rogers

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