4 Ps of Creativity (Mel Rhodes)
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James Melvin "Mel" Rhodes (1916 – 1976) was an American educational scientist, assistant professor of education and creativity researcher who was the originator of the pioneering concept of the 4 Ps of creativity.
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Rhodes theory asserts that creativity is not merely an elusive and fuzzy capacity with no predictable structure, but exhibits a clear-cut composition of four essential components and dominant factors which have an impact to any kind of result, solution or idea. In his epoch-making article Rhodes wrote 1961:
"About five years ago I set out to find a definition of the word creativity. I was interested in imagination, originality, and ingenuity. In time I had collected forty definitions of creativity and sixteen of imagination. But as I inspected my collection I observed that the definitions are not mutually exclusive. They overlap and intertwine. When analyzed, as through a prism, the content of the definitions form four strands. Each strand has unique identity academically, but only in unity do the four strands operate functionally."
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This article became the probably most cited single source in applied creativity ever and has established Rhodes' reputation as a pioneering contributor to creativity research, since it not only endowed a seemingly unstructured field with a structure, but delivered a classification system and within it four precise starting-points for classified research about creativity.
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Rhodes defined four separate strands which have influence on the occurrence of creativity and which represent the essential cornerstones for any kind of creativity research: Person, Process, Press and Product:
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"The term person, as used here, covers information about personality, intellect, temperament, physique, traits, habits, attitudes, self-concept, value systems, defense mechanisms, and behavior." (p. 307).
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"The term process applies to motivation, perception, learning, thinking, and communication." (p. 308).
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"The term press refers to the relationship between human beings and their environment." (p. 308). This notion and the word "press" are rather common in the field of education.
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"The term product refers to a thought which has been communicated to other people in the form of words, paint, clay, metal, stone, fabric, or other material. When an idea becomes embodied into tangible form it is called a product." (p. 309).
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Source: wikipedia
Further reading:
Mel Rhodes: An analysis of creativity. in Phi Delta Kappan 1961, Vol. 42: 305–311
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