You don't have to be an artist to be creative!

Author Reshma Budhia shows in her book how creativity is essentially a problem-solving skill

When certified "Design Thinking Specialist" Reshma Budhia conducted workshops on design thinking, most participants believed they were not creative and associated creativity with art. This response led to her writing "I AM," a simple but effective guide for children and adults on creativity as a problem-solving process. Here are the excerpts from an interview with the author.

What is "I AM" all about?

'I AM,' is a picture book that defines the meaning of creativity. It has been inspired by and uses the principles of Design Thinking.

Design thinking is a framework for problem-solving that enhances our thinking skills and gives us tools and techniques to expand our problem-solving abilities.

After conducting workshops, it became clear that an entire generation of professionals have grown up believing that creativity is the domain of those involved in the visual and performing arts. Those who love numbers and analytics with no exposure to the arts labelled themselves as 'not creative.' They couldn’t be more wrong.

I started to think of how to get this message across in a simple and non-preachy format. Albert Einstein famously said, 'If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.' This statement stayed with me and became the foundation of this book that explains the real meaning of creativity through a simple story.

Was the book inspired by your real-life experiences?

‘I AM’ was not born as an impulsive, spur-of-the-moment story. For most of my adult life, I believed I wasn’t creative because I was not an artist. However, I always loved to ideate and solve day-to-day challenges. While completing a degree in Design Thinking, I figured that the art of problem-solving is called creativity. This was an amazing discovery as it gave a method to my madness and a framework that I could apply easily.

How involved were you with the creative aspects of the book?

This book is an illustrated picture book, so I needed to be involved in all aspects of production, including visualizing the illustrations in a way that would bring out the equation between the two characters.

I am not an artist, so it was hard to sketch out the emotions and elements needed for every page. Then creativity struck. I decided to get my sons to enact the entire story and captured the moments as pictures. I used those pictures as a base and traced the key pages and emotions; this helped my illustrator Bhavani Sitaraman understand my vision and gave her the foundation to design the book.

What has been your biggest challenge?

This book is for both adults and children. I have been trying to articulate how everyone needs to understand creativity, especially adults. However, not many adults understand that picture books are not for just children. My publisher, Paper Town Publishers, understood the vision of my book and had an online presence, which I hoped would help promote the book.

Do you have future book projects in the pipeline?

‘I AM’ will be a series of books built on the foundation of design thinking but with different themes. I am currently working on the second book in this series. This book will focus on helping the reader discover their true self outside their gender, roles, race and class.

(Neeti Jaychander is a journalist, writer and lecturer based in Chennai)