Draft:Everyday Creativity

Everyday Creativity is a term used in the social sciences to describe day-to-day activities that are broadly ‘creative’ in that they are experienced as novel, useful or purposeful. These may include acts of self-expression, making, development, interpretation and transformation.

Such experiences and activities have been linked to wellbeing through a wide range of mechanisms including community support and connection, self-efficacy, a sense of competence and achievement, self-expression, immersion and escapism.

Everyday Creativity is typically contrasted with creativity associated with professional practice, specialist training or elite interests. The term also focuses on creative processes over creative products, on active creative participation rather than consumption, and on the amateur or grassroots rather than professional sphere.

Everyday Creativity is used to describe activities and experiences associated with the arts and cultural sector. However it can also incorporate creative actions in contexts of, for example, science, engineering, education and learning, child development and other areas.

According to the 2022 article “Understanding Everyday Creativity’’, “everyday creativity reflects ideas about everydayness and the mundane, banal and taken-for-granted practices of life... the study of which can reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary.” Examples of activities commonly associated with Everyday Creativity include joke-telling, cooking, community choirs, gardening, podcasting and citizen science. These activities may be both individual and group-based, taking place in the home, online, or in shared community spaces.

The Four-C Model, and alternative terms
The Four-C Model of creativity was developed by James C. Kaufman and RA Beghetto in 2009. According to this model, creativity can be ‘Big-C’, ‘Pro-C’ ‘little-c’ and ‘mini-c’.

Big-C creativity is associated with elite and eminent creative products. Pro-C creativity is associated with professional but not eminent creative practice. Little-c creativity refers to small observable actions, products and ideas that may also be of value to others. Mini-c creativity focuses on more fleeting “interpretive and transformative aspects of thought” that are unique and meaningful for an individual.

Although everyday creativity is often used interchangeably with ‘little-c’ creativity, it is increasingly understood as including elements of ‘mini-c’ creativity too.

The scope of ‘everyday creativity’ has also been framed by terms such as ‘daily creativity’ and ‘vernacular creativity’ and has been implied in relation to concepts like ‘cultural democracy’.

History and evolution of the concept
The term, ‘everyday creativity’ developed within social science and creativity research in part from Harvard Medical School and the work of psychologists Ruth Richards, Dennis K Kinney, Maria Benet and Ann P Merzel. In their 1988 article, they introduced the ‘Lifetime Creativity Scales’ tool, based upon a definition of creativity in terms of original and adaptive actions. This represented an expansion of creativity research beyond the then established focus on skilled, purposeful practitioners, lauded by art critics and other established gatekeepers, towards what they termed a "broad based view of creativity ... present to varying degrees in most types of activity." Their subsequent 2007 publication, ‘’Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature: Psychological, Social, and Spiritual Perspectives’’, reflected further on this understanding of the role of creative practices in the context of our daily lives.

In 2011, Zorana Ivcevic continued this work with her creation of a taxonomy of expressive behaviours. Recognising that creative practice might be more commonly established in formal domains and acknowledged centres for cultural activity, she examined the similarities and differences between artistic and other forms of creativity in everyday contexts, exploring the relationship between everyday creativity, personality traits, psychological well-being and psychopathology.

Developments in the United Kingdom
In the wake of the 2015 Warwick Commission Report into Cultural Value arts and community organisations in the United Kingdom began increasingly to mobilise the concept of everyday creativity in their practice, with a particular focus on activities facilitated by voluntary groups in shared community spaces. One example is the work of Creative Lives who in March 2021 hosted an online discussion with key UK-based creative practitioners and academics in the field.

In March 2016, Arts Council England’s 64 Million Artists undertook a consultation with 300 professional and everyday artists, cultural organisations, community groups, local authorities, scholars and others in the UK to explore how everyday creative practices could be better valued and supported. Their report considered whether, and how, the formal, funded cultural sector should be engaging with everyday creativity, and how everyday creativity could be better valued and supported in this context.

Explorations on everyday creativity in the UK then became evident in a wide range of fields, including the 2019 Durham Commission on Creativity and Education report, work on social prescribing, and the work of the AHRC Everyday Creativity Research Network established in 2023.