Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Graphic design, drawing, creating and recording music: these are a few of Ryan Wing’s favorite things. He puts a lot of passion into his creative endeavors — and into studying economics.
Wing, San Jose, Calif., junior, grew up with a passion for visual art and pursued a career in music recording before deciding to follow his interest in sustainability issues into a degree in economics.
The merger of creativity and fields such as economics will be one topic discussed in a new lecture series sponsored by the University Honors Program, which starts tonight. With the lecture series and a corresponding class, the University Honors Program is working to explore where ideas and innovation come from and to promote interdisciplinary discussion and transfer of ideas.
Professor Beverly Mack shows examples nontraditional forms of creativity on Monday night in Spencer Hall. The new lecture series on creativity in seemingly unrelated fields begins tonight with a lecture by New York visual artist Chakaia Booker at 7:30 in Spooner Hall.
Wing said creative and technical pursuits were often seen as separate things to be done by separate people, but said scientists needed arts just as much as artists needed science.
“Growing up, you’re always told that if you’re ‘creative,’ you won’t be interested in or any good at things like economics,” Wing said. “But if you’re creative but you can’t come up with a market for your creations, you’re not going to be creative for very long — you’ll be broke.”
Beverly Mack, professor of African and African-American studies and the instructor of the lecture series’ corresponding course, said creativity and economics merge.
“Too often, our knee-jerk response is to assume ‘creativity’ is only in the fine arts, but there is creativity in every field,” Mack said.
Sarah Crawford-Parker, associate director of the Honors Program, said now was a better time than ever to discuss creativity as a way to promote new solutions to the country’s economic and political challenges.
Sarah Frazelle, lecturer of economics, is researching creativity in economics at the University for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Frazelle said entrepreneurship was a crucial part of economic growth and was a big part of her research on ways to spur growth in third-world countries.
“The conventional wisdom is that entrepreneurship leads to innovation, which leads to economic growth,” Frazelle said.
Dawn Marie Guernsey, professor of art, said economics and creativity came together in arts education, which prepared students for the kind of creative business thinking that Frazelle and Wing said was so important.
Guernsey also said artists aimed to introduce ideas for solving national problems like the economic downturn in their work.
“Artists are the weather vanes for the times and the eyes and the ears of culture,” Guernsey said.
The lecture series opens tonight with a talk by New York visual artist Chakaia Booker at 7:30 in Spooner Hall.
— — Edited by Casey Miles
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New lecture series examines creativity
Every human has been creative since day one. One of my pet peeves against university professors is that they can be so out of touch with reality. I believe that we are created by a highly creative and humorous God, just look at the diversity on this planet and that we are all like our Dad. Infinite diversity in infinite combination.
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