Uploaded January 2022 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
The 2021 Annual Torrance Lecture by Paul Silvia
Ordinary Creativity in Everyday Life: What Our Quirky Hobbies, Projects, and Passions Reveal About Human Creativity
Organizer: The Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development
University of Georgia
Lecture Summary:
Although the famous ideas and creators get most of the attention, nearly all human creativity is mundane: the countless hobbies, projects, and passions that allow people to spend time doing something creative in everyday life, be it knitting scarves, writing poems, making jewelry, or decorating cupcakes. This talk peeks into the surprising world of ordinary creativity. Using experience-sampling methods that measure people's creative ideas and actions where and when they happen, we find that creative activity in daily life is utterly pervasive, a source of positive emotion, and a way to build satisfying skills and relationships. All told, ordinary creativity reveals something special about our motivation to be creative.
Speaker Info:
Paul Silvia is the Lucy Spinks Keker Excellence Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A past-president of the American Psychological Association (APA) Division 10, he applies ecological assessment methods to study creativity and the arts in people's real-world environments, and he has written books on the psychology of interest and on conducting daily-life research. He has an unseemly number of quirky hobbies.
The University of Georgia
copyright © 2022
The 2021 Annual Torrance Lecture by Paul Silvia
Ordinary Creativity in Everyday Life: What Our Quirky Hobbies, Projects, and Passions Reveal About Human Creativity
Organizer: The Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development
University of Georgia
Lecture Summary:
Although the famous ideas and creators get most of the attention, nearly all human creativity is mundane: the countless hobbies, projects, and passions that allow people to spend time doing something creative in everyday life, be it knitting scarves, writing poems, making jewelry, or decorating cupcakes. This talk peeks into the surprising world of ordinary creativity. Using experience-sampling methods that measure people's creative ideas and actions where and when they happen, we find that creative activity in daily life is utterly pervasive, a source of positive emotion, and a way to build satisfying skills and relationships. All told, ordinary creativity reveals something special about our motivation to be creative.
Speaker Info:
Paul Silvia is the Lucy Spinks Keker Excellence Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A past-president of the American Psychological Association (APA) Division 10, he applies ecological assessment methods to study creativity and the arts in people's real-world environments, and he has written books on the psychology of interest and on conducting daily-life research. He has an unseemly number of quirky hobbies.
The University of Georgia
copyright © 2022
