Vic U Launches Centre for Creativity

^{Photo: Minh Truong, graphic by Will Dang}

By Leslie Shepherd

The need for creativity and creative thinking has never been greater, as rapidly evolving technology, artificial intelligence, volatile financial markets and climate change disrupt and transform the labour market, the future of work and our social interactions.

Creativity is the new “it” skill, according to an RBC report on how human ingenuity will power the post-pandemic 2020s.

Creative thinking was also identified as the second-most important core skill for workers in the 2023 Future of Jobs Report by the World Economic Forum, outranked only by analytical thinking, but ahead of technological literacy, dependability and attention to detail, or leadership and social influence.

Many talented people at Victoria University, the University of Toronto and elsewhere are engaged in creative or innovative enterprises in their specific areas of expertise. But there are surprisingly few places where people across these siloed disciplines can get together to compare ideas, share best practices and collaborate.

That’s why Victoria University has launched a new Centre for Creativity to bring together students, faculty, artists, thinkers and others from the arts, sciences, and technology to find creative solutions to the problems facing our society and creative ways to foster equitable, diverse and inclusive communities.

“The idea of the centre is to create programming, events and spaces where creative people from different disciplines can encounter each other and learn from one another,” said Professor Adam Sol, the centre’s launch director and coordinator of the Vic One program.

“Creative people are stimulated by one another even if they are not in the same discipline. Every important intellectual movement from the European Renaissance to the Harlem Renaissance included conversations across interests. We will ask questions like whether creativity is a talent that some have more of than others, or is it an attribute that can be developed in everyone? Does it work more effectively in teams or individually? Gradually or with sudden disruptions? Does it function differently across cultures, communities, disciplines, languages?”

The centre will also provide an academic home and vibrant meeting place for the next generation of creators and cultural entrepreneurs, where they can get hands-on experience to develop their talents and launch their careers.

Victoria University is ideally located to host the centre, being located in central Toronto, amid the city’s arts and culture scene, and the main centres of scientific research.

The first step is to get people from different fields in the same room or virtual space, Sol said. While the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music is just across Queen’s Park Circle from Victoria University, the science departments are a half-mile away and the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is on the exact opposite end of the St. George campus.

Vic U President Dr. Rhonda McEwen said one focus of the new centre will be how to use creativity to solve big problems.

“All wicked problems in the world, those for which we cannot rely solely on past practices, require a creative mind to fix,” said McEwen, who brings a STEM background to a university known for the humanities.

“We find solutions through interdisciplinary ways, taking ideas from one discipline and applying them to others. I am excited to move my own research lab—Emerging Technologies and the Arts—under the Center for Creativity at Vic U.”

McEwen noted that in his book Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, American journalist David Epstein looked at the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists and discovered that in most fields— especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.

Generalists often find their path later, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one, Epstein wrote. They’re also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see.

McEwen said the new centre has the potential to be a differentiator for Victoria University, which has a long history of interdisciplinary creativity. Famous alumni include not just authors Margaret Atwood and Northrop Frye, filmmaker Norman Jewison, and actor Donald Sutherland (who graduated with a dual degree in engineering and drama), but people like Graeme Ferguson, who studied political science and economics at Vic before becoming one of the coinventors of the IMAX widescreen cinematography technique. And Dr. Arthur Schawlow, who came to Victoria College to study English literature and earned a PhD in physics from U of T; he developed the theoretical basis for laser science and shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The new Centre for Creativity hopes to build on this foundation and deepen the integration of scientific and humanistic thinking.