Earlier last year for one of my university courses, I was given a web development task which, through utilising basic RESTful services, requested and posted information to a webpage which we would then have to design and make navigational and functional. The task itself was simple enough, a bit of basic API endpoint handling, XML/JSON parsing, along with some intermediate knowledge of front-end and you could manage quite easily. The exercise was centered around rebuilding a pre-existing web application within the university database, one which was now believed to be outdated and obsolete. Each submission would be carefully reviewed and the design that was deemed to be the ‘best’ would replace the previous site and be used in its place indefinitely. Besides the slightly off-putting fact that it seemed to me the university was halfheartedly attempting at outsourcing its errands to its students, something else stuck out to me that has still remained fresh in my mind since the day I read the brief for the assignment. It is grounded further in my more broad disdain for how the university I attended approached how ‘computer science’ was fundamentally taught - however that is another story for another time. The brief instructed us to build the site and design it entirely from scratch, without the aid of any existing libraries, frameworks, existing templates or designs. The reasoning being that they wanted us to showcase our own ‘creativity’ in our submissions, and wanted the work to reflect our own ideas and technical skills. While I do understand that for the purposes of academic integrity, you may not want students submitting plagiarised designs and code, but the understanding of what can be considered ‘creative’ is something that I find irrational and in some ways reprehensible. Generally speaking, I believe that it is essentially impossible to have ideas which are truly organic or unique, particularly in a contemporary world with such incredible amounts of stimulus so readily available and accessible to everyone and anyone. Whether done through conscious efforts or not, our thoughts and decisions are shaped by the world around us - and I don't believe this is inherently a ‘bad’ thing in the slightest. In most cases, this keeps us grounded in some sense of what is considered 'normal', and it allows us to keep in touch with reality. Often people may ask the question of: “how do I know if my idea doesn't exist already/hasn't been done before?". I believe that as a general rule of thumb, it is safe to assume your idea already exists somewhere else, regardless of whether or not you've even asked the question. The issues lies within this toxic mindset that the question itself participates in, and it demonstrates a lack of freedom within one's approach to their understanding of 'creativity'. The same issues are what have drawn me to writing this article, and from the perspective of computer science they are especially harmful to junior/graduates who are meant to be getting ready for the industry. Within the context of computer science, collaboration is an intrinsic part of what pushes the industry forward and ensures a sense of sustainability for both freelancers and businesses alike. Open-sourcing a project or asking for the help of one or multiple developers does not render the project as not ‘creative’ or illegitimate. It goes without saying that stealing someone's work and masquerading it as your own/profiting from it is exempt from these notions, however granted sufficient permissions/licensing/crediting practices are maintained, I believe that the collective effort of a group of people invites a completely new and improved sense of what it means to be creative. As I mentioned previously, attempting to discourage plagiarism and cheating is a rational stance which has rightfully earned it's place in most university environments. Academic integrity is not however something which should be used as a gate-keeping mechanism that tries to establish what can or cannot be considered creative. Some of my proudest and most creative projects exist because of the community of ideas that came before them. They are present because of the help of existing frameworks, libraries and designs which I found interactive and engaging. New developers and programmers need to recognise the importance of distancing themselves from such a preconceived notion of isolated creativity.
With all of this being said, the death of what might have been traditionally considered ‘creativity’ is completely understandable. To me, creativity now depends on the legacy and the work of others in order to survive. There exists a larger dependency on the indefinite evolution of an existing idea rather than the contrived and forced creation of new ones. I hope that it stays this way.
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"It's not where you take things from — it's where you take them to." - Jean-Luc Godard
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