Creativity makes us all more informed, and makes new information understandable

Designers in media and education enhance learning by organizing information visually and creating for example illustrations, videos and games to complement text.  Easily absorbable information is essential in education and to help us to continuously keep up to date with the skills needed for work

information design

UX-design

graphic design

illustrators

game design

When we first started comprehensive school many of us couldn’t read. However the books we received were filled with pictures helping us to understand the concepts we were learning about and keeping us engaged in whatever was happening in the class. Even after we learned to read, much of the learning material was visual and organised in a visual form making the topics easy to learn - informative pictures, tables, boxes, lists and so on. The themes we needed to learn were also available in the form of illustrations, posters or sometimes even as videos.

Nowadays the digital learning tools, games and other material, have also become a regular part of the learning toolbox for teachers. And there is a good reason to all of this – visual learning is a powerful way to convey information. Most of us learn best with the help of visual learning material.

The visual enhancement of learning doesn’t just limit to schools and education: we also learn a lot through visualisations made for media. Infographical images and animations of complex topics are used everywhere. In the era, where we have more and more information available and less and less time to go through it, the visual breakdown of complex scientific ideas, societal matters and other topics is essential for spreading knowledge. In the modern working world just getting a degree isn’t enough anymore. We need to constantly absorb new information and update our skills. Efficiency in learning in the hectic work world is important. In order to keep us intelligent as a society we need the designers and artists in the fields of media and education to turn the flood of information into a form that everyone can grasp.

Creative fields are needed for finding solutions to individual and global challenges

Design is an important part of an innovation ecosystem. Design practices help organisations and companies investigate problems from different angles and develop creative solutions. Design process is empathic and aims to comprehensively understand people’s needs.

industrial design

interface design

ux/ui design

fashion design

innovation

design thinking

If you look around in wherever you are, you will most likely see design. Designers have shaped the laptop you use and they have shaped the chair and table you sit by to be ergonomic and visually pleasing. A fashion designer has designed the clothes in your wardrobe. UX designers have designed all the interfaces you use every day, from your smartphone to the ticket system in the bus. During the design process a designer has also taken to consideration how the products are manufactured and what materials are used – a great deal of our world lives in interaction with design.

Design is a very important part of the industrial chain, providing you the every-day goods and services. Huge amount of companies have designers on board in various positions. Design operates as a layer added on nearly every item making it not just more aesthetic, but more intuitive to use and more accessible by different people. Design is empathetic and during the design process the designer carefully considers how the user feels and acts when using an artefact. Was it from designers at Fiskars carefully shaping your scissors to suit your hand and easily apply pressure when cutting fabric or creating innovations to provide affordable solutions to the challenges faced by people living in poverty, creative fields are needed to make the world around us to work with ease and make sense, not to mention to be affordable and sustainable!

Creativity on its own is a resource that makes the society more adaptable. it’s necessary to be able to create understandable concepts of scattered entities and see problems from new angles so that we can respond to the future challenges. We need refined expertise in creating new connections between different themes and understanding of systematic development of innovations.

In the future we will need design innovations in clothing, vehicle and industrial design, just to name few fields, to help us to develop less polluting products and manufacturing lines with smaller carbon footprints. Multi-disciplinary and creative co-operation in innovation development, user experience and research is essential so that we can bring the benefits of newly developed technology, like artificial intelligence and blockchain, available to everyone. Creative industries can help to make all of our lives better.

Creativity is needed to create pioneering inventions and economical growth

Creativity results in successful brands and cutting edge product design. Internationally recognized creative community and education makes the whole country more desirable for businesses.

industrial design

interface design

branding

graphic design

advertising

When you go to a shop you are surrounded by different brands. These numerous brands communicate many aspects of the product with other means than writing. The package colouring may indicate whether the Fazer chocolate you choose is good for exclusive and sophisticated taste or if it’s a better fit for a child’s birthday party. Just seeing the brand itself provoke a lot of different notions and mental images. The design of the logo, colors, packaging and shape of the product trigger a whole chain of thoughts and associations regarding the quality, history and the personality of the brand or of those who consume it.

Graphic design and package design are integral to marketing communication of a product. Design, marketing and business are inseparable. Beautiful design ensures good first impressions which are crucial when a product is first encountered by the consumer. All the aspects of the brand identity from the look and feel to even the sound create a personality and story to the brand which then builds a relationships with consumers and keep them loyal to the brand.

Benefits of design are evident not only in branding and advertising, but also in developing innovations. Design aims to essentially solve problems and design practises used in product development promote a more empathetic approach, aiming to comprehend the full needs of the user. Good background research and user-focused design is often to thank for a successful product launches. Apple’s Iphones are prime examples of what great design practises can result in. The aerodynamic and elegantly shaped devices are not just beautiful but also very user friendly. Meticulous product design combined with flawless branding Apple was able to communicate what its brand stands for in a way that undeniably resonated with their target audience.

The need for higher level understandings of product development is only going to increase with automatisation and AI transformation. Our design education must must keep up with this demand to continue to be internationally recognised and desirable. In order for Finland to have great brands and great innovations in the future and to be one of the pioneering countries when it comes to technology and other industries we need to admit the role of design. We need to ensure that the designers have resources necessary to help us to create stories like Nokia, Kone and Stora Enso. Good design means better sales, more jobs and above all, a stronger national economy.

Creativity reduces isolation and loneliness and makes life more meaningful

Creative hobbies enhance learning in general, help people suffering from mental and physical illnesses and reduces isolation and loneliness. Engaging in art and culture activities is connected to better well-being.

tv

cinema

stories

writers

illustrators

actors

media designers

videography

game design

directors

musicians

Throughout our lives we are exposed to arts as leisure activity. We take piano lessons, we have art and music classes at school, we go to museums. Although this may seem like something you wouldn’t always consider as the most essential part of your life, engaging in arts has actually plenty of benefits that we may not always be aware of.

Art and culture are linked to good health and people who engage in arts and culture report higher subjective well being. The benefits of engagement to art have been recognised by many health actors who offer it in a form of art therapy or as a general tool to add well being in care homes and hospitals. For people suffering from mental illnesses art may act as a tool to engage socially and in therapy art helps people to express complex emotions and increases the experience of self worth. In community level the participation to culture events creates social cohesion and reduces social exclusion resulting in general well-being.

Arts can also enhance learning – for example music activities regularly implemented in school environments were linked to better overall school performance. Learning music improves cognitive skills in general and improves verbal and language skills among others. Creative thinking and skill development such as image making or learning music are complex processes stimulating many parts of the brain, resulting in improvement in a range of skills not just limited to art.

Arts and culture can be used as a tool in many fields to help with social and health problems. They give content to the everyday life making it more meaningful and creating a framework for social interactions. Creative fields can help us psychologically, pedagogically and socially. As a society we need develop a deeper understanding of the significant benefits that art activities offer and further research how to use creativity in our favour in school system, health sector and in community development initiatives.

Case study: Creative workforce has influence everywhere

There are thousands of creative professionals, working in just about every industry and field of business.

There are actors, artisans, designers, directors, architects and copywriters among others who are making the World easier to understand, designing products to be more appealing, businesses more profitable, and life more enjoyable.

The amount of creative professionals, 2016

As there are professions identified as creative, there are also fields or industries that are creative. Some of the fields and professions are more creative than others, but it is difficult or even impossible to agree on a creativity level. Or is it? Creative intensity is an attempt to describe how creative the field actually is: it tells the share of the creative workforce in a certain field. In the visualization below the higher the bubble is, the bigger is the creative intensity. And the bigger the bubble, the bigger the total workforce, both creative and non-creative.

The size and intensity of creative fields, 2016

These bubbles might suggest that creative professionals only work in certain creative fields, but that would be quite a simplification. Of course many creative pros work in their own field, but common sense tells that they actually work in every field, and vice versa: every field needs creativity. And below we have a visualization to proof that: creative professionals really do influence everywhere.

Classifying creativity

Meaning of creative professionals to our society is somewhat understandable, but what exactly are creative professions? Composers and poets are creative for sure, but are programmers or traffic planners as well?

There are several ways to classify creative occupations, and we could have made one by ourself only to be used in this project. Or we could have used jobs listed in Culture Satellite Account. Or maybe we could have looked at design professions, for example how Ornamo looks at them. Then there are Knowledge Intensive Business Services or KIBS industries as well. Or would it be easier to just rely on a List of Artistic occupations found in Wikipedia?

Problem is that all of these seem to look at creative fields or occupations from certain perspective. Culture Satellite is pretty good as it is a wide list around cultural professions and industries, but then again it includes fields such as Sales of consumer electronics. Ornamo on the other hand lists design related professions, but excludes for example stage arts and music. KIBS is interesting and also relevant, but it is too wide to use a base for creativity project, as it includes for example legal, funding, and insurance services. Online listings of creative professions are problematic, as they are often only stating the job title, but not statistics codes for example: Knowing exactly what professions we are dealing with, or finding reliable data about the would be very difficult.

Of course we are not the first ones with this problem. Companies, employment and industries are very well represented in statistics, and different sorts of classifications are needed for many purposes – measuring creative economy being one of them. Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sports UK (DCMS) has a list of creative occupations. It features more than 40 occupations in nine sectors. However, it is also a bit controversial, as it should be. Modifications have been suggested to it, as seen in a Wikipedia article.

DCMS classification seemed to be quite close to what we had been looking for: a simple list that can be connected to statistical data. At this point we also got a bit lucky: VTT had released a report on creative economy in 2018, where they for example studied ways of classifying creative occupations and industries. In the end the report was based on the DCMS classification, but VTT modified it a bit, to make it better fit to Finnish creative ecosystem. That classification of creative occupations and industries was clear, easy, and ready to use, so we decided that it would make a good base for the project. Creative occupations were clearly listed, as were respective Standard Occupational Classification codes – and that would allow use of data from Statistics Finland.

Finally we got to Creative Intensity, and we actually encountered something quite interesting. VTT used employment data from 2015 in their report, but our data was from 2016. One could still imagine CI to be somewhat similar between these years, and overall the percentages should be quite close. But there are a few outliers: Cultural education dropped 22 percent points, and Operation of historical sites and buildings and similar visitor attractions went down whopping 56 percentage points. Unfortunately we couldn’t dive deeper to these in this project, but this is an indication that Creative Intensity shouldn’t be determined on one year’s data alone.