Introduction
‘Inspiration’ is an ancient concept, but our understanding of the actual phenomenon it describes hasn't been explored much since the term's divine origin. Ancient Greek poets were inspired, reciting as a conduit from the Gods. Artists and designers I spoke to about this project called this creative stage ‘exciting’, ‘sublime’ and forgot to eat or sleep while inspired.Footnote 1 I believe that most people, whether they consider themselves creative or not, would have an intuitive understanding of this term.
In the library and information science (LIS) literature on artists and designers, inspiration is identified as a crucial information need. Based on his comprehensive literature review of 2008, William Hemmig cites it as one of five reasons that artists need information, along with ‘specific visual elements’, ‘knowledge of materials and techniques’, ‘marketing and career guidance’, ‘and knowledge of current trends in the art world’.Footnote 2
Helen Mason and Lyn Robinson's 2011 article explored a range of sources of inspiration used by emerging artists, which included everything from artists’ monographs, European cinema, and Vogue, to ‘people on the street’, ‘autism’ and ‘taking a bath’.Footnote 3 Although some of these sources could be found in libraries, many were far beyond their remit.
When writing my masters dissertation in 2013, I found little explanation of what ‘inspiration’ meant in the LIS literature. In the intervening years, LIS researchers have started to look to other fields to understand creativity and inspiration, and how libraries, archives, and museums can play a role.Footnote 4
The intention of this article is to bring a greater awareness to the existing research that has been done in the areas of creativity and inspiration, and link this back to LIS research on the information behaviours that can help inspiration and the creative process.
Creativity research in psychology
In the field of psychology, creativity has been a growing area of interest since the second half of the 20th century.Footnote 5 However, even within psychology, the concept of ‘inspiration’ has only recently begun to be explored in-depth.Footnote 6
Graham Wallas’ 1926 model of creative thinking is an example of an enduring theory that is still cited in psychological research today.Footnote 7 I keep coming back to it as a useful way to understand my own creative process, and I have also used it to structure a session with students on how to start their dissertation research. Wallas identified four distinct stages of creative thinking - preparation (consciously working on the problem), incubation (going away from the work while unconscious thought continues), illumination (a flash of insight), and verification (where the solution is tested).Footnote 8 It is important to note that the creative process is iterative, and one may skip between these stages hundreds of times within the same project.
Another psychological concept that could be argued to overlap with inspiration is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of ‘flow’. Csikszentmihalyi's work was influenced by growing up in Hungary and Italy during World War II and seeing how some people still managed to cope despite the circumstances.Footnote 9 One explanation he found was that being completely immersed in a task could lead to intense satisfaction. Csikszentmihalyi interviewed people in numerous disciplines such as artists, rock climbers, factory workers, and chess players, and found that ‘flow’ was an analogy that came up frequently.Footnote 10
The nine characteristics of flow are:
there are clear goals every step of the way […] there is immediate feedback to one's actions […] there is a balance between challenge and skills […] actions and awareness are merged […] distractions are excluded from consciousness […] there is no worry of failure […] self-consciousness disappears […] the sense of time becomes distorted […] the activity becomes autotelic […] (something that is an end in itself).Footnote 11
When I interviewed art and design practitioners for my dissertation, one of them spoke of forgetting to eat or sleep while inspired.Footnote 12 Having experienced this intense motivation and concentration in my own work, it seemed very much like the description of ‘flow’. Csikszentmihalyi notes that human brains can only process about 110 bits of information per second. Listening to someone talk requires about 60 bits per second, which is why we can't concentrate on two people talking simultaneously. When in ‘flow’, people are often so immersed in the task at hand, that they don't have enough attention left to feel the signals from their body, like tiredness or hunger. One composer that Csikszentmihalyi interviewed spoke of feeling like he didn't exist and his hand moving of its own accord. The composer described losing his sense of identity and body as ‘an ecstatic state’, full of ‘awe and wonderment’.Footnote 13 This phenomenon is perhaps why ‘flow’ and related states of inspiration are often described in mystical terms.
Inspiration research in psychology
Throughout the creativity research, one sees hints at a definition of ‘inspiration’, but it has rarely been the focus of psychological research in itself. Todd M. Thrash and his colleagues believe this is due to a lack of clear definitions and foundational constructs; the prevalence of domain-specific, rather than mainstream theories; and the persistence of myths and misconceptions about inspiration.Footnote 14
Todd M. Thrash and Andrew J. Elliot defined inspiration as a construct involving three characteristics – transcendence, evocation, and motivation.Footnote 15
Transcendence, meaning that the individual has gained an awareness of new or better possibilities […] evocation or receptivity; one is inspired by something in particular, and therefore, one does not attribute to oneself responsibility for becoming inspired, at least not full or direct responsibility […] Finally, inspiration involves approach motivation, such that one feels compelled to bring one's new idea or vision into fruition.Footnote 16
Thrash and Elliot later found that the two components of inspiration are being inspired by and being inspired to. A painter may be inspired by a beautiful landscape and be inspired to create a painting. Being inspired by includes the characteristics of transcendence and evocation, and being inspired to includes approach motivation. However, it's also possible to be inspired by a beautiful landscape, and not be inspired to create anything.Footnote 17
Building on their research, Todd M. Thrash and colleagues proposed three forms of transmission in inspiration that can work across domains: replication, actualization, and expression. They include creative, interpersonal, and religious inspiration as examples their research. An example of replication could be someone inspired to model themselves after Christ; actualization could be someone inspired to follow a certain career path, and expression could be someone inspired to write poetry.Footnote 18 The researchers see a link between creativity and inspiration in all domains, because inspiration that is somehow transmitted is inherently constructive and creative.Footnote 19 However, they do not believe inspiration is the source of creative ideas, but rather the motivational response to them.Footnote 20
Thrash and colleagues have attempted to disambiguate between related psychological terms such as inspiration and insight and illumination. Insight is usually defined as an ‘aha’ or ‘eureka’ moment of thought. According to Thrash and colleagues, insight can lead to inspiration, but they are separate concepts. For example, a moment of insight can lack motivation and stay as thought rather than action, and inspiration doesn't always require a moment of insight to be triggered. In a similar way, illumination, as defined in Wallas’ 1926 model, is a stage of the creative process, and Thrash and his colleagues believe that inspiration could occur throughout the whole process.Footnote 21
Although Thrash and his colleagues don't discuss the potential overlap of ‘inspiration’ and ‘flow’, they both seem to include motivational states. Perhaps the main differences are that inspiration does not always lead to the motivation to transmit (as in being inspired by something but not to something), and flow does not need to be triggered by anything other than the mundane task at hand.
Thrash and his colleagues believe that inspiration is often devalued in creativity literature by the famous quote from Thomas Edison that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. However, their findings show that the level of inspiration reported by a writer predicted the creativity of their work, but the amount of effort put in did not. While both inspiration and effort are important, they play different roles in the creative process.Footnote 22
Finding inspiration
Thrash and Elliot's construct of inspiration involves the characteristic of evocation, which implies that passive acquisition is key to an experience being labelled as ‘inspiration’. Although inspiration can't be forced, I do think that creative people often develop strategies to help different aspects of their creative process. For example, in an interview for my dissertation, one practitioner talked about how she deliberately thinks about her current project before falling asleep, when her thinking is looser.Footnote 23
For many years, the library and information science literature mainly explored purposive, problem-driven, active searching, but there is a growing interest in passive, non-directed information behaviour. Through my research, I found four theories that were particularly useful when finding inspiration – browsing, information encountering, satisficing, and serendipity.
Many previous articles have discussed the importance of browsing for artists and designers.Footnote 24 Researcher Marcia J. Bates writes,
[…] browsing can be seen to contain four elements, iterated indefinitely, until the overall episode ends: 1. glimpsing a field of vision; 2. selecting or sampling a physical or representational object from the field; 3. examining the object; and 4. physically or conceptually acquiring the examined object, or abandoning it.Footnote 25
However, in writing about artists, librarian Susie Cobbledick believed that the, ‘importance of browsing can be overstated.’Footnote 26 She found that when artists did browse, they did so within limited subject areas.Footnote 27
Helen Mason and Lyn Robinson linked the information behaviour of emerging artists to Sanda Erdelez's 1997 model of ‘information encountering’ (IE).Footnote 28 The model of IE identifies the following steps, with some variations: noticing, stopping, examining, capturing, and returning. This involves a switch between a ‘foreground problem’ and a ‘background interest/problems/tasks’.Footnote 29 Her framework contains three key elements: the characteristics of the information user, the characteristics of the information environment, and the characteristics of the encountered information. She also tentatively categorised the information users as non-encounterers, occasional encounterers, encounterers, and super-encounterers.Footnote 30
Both Bates and Erdelez see links between their theories, and ‘satisficing’, also known as ‘Zipf's principle of least effort’ (1949). The principle of least effort states that, ‘people invest little in seeking information, preferring easy-to-use, accessible sources to sources of known high quality that are less easy to use and/or less accessible.’Footnote 31
Stephann Makri and Ann Blandford developed a definition of serendipity,
[…] as a process of making a mental connection that has the potential to lead to a valuable outcome, projecting the value of the outcome and taking actions to exploit the connection, leading to a valuable outcome.Footnote 32
For them, serendipity was a label given to an experience after it had occurred.Footnote 33
Demystifying inspiration
Susie Cobbledick's 1996 article cited a lack of research by librarians into the information needs of artists. She writes, ‘a probable explanation lies in the persistent appeal of certain preconceptions concerning artists – that they are intuitive, self-contained individuals who create via inspiration.’Footnote 34 This sentiment is echoed by inspiration researcher Todd M. Thrash and his colleagues,Footnote 35 as well as creativity researchers Robert J. Sternberg and Todd I. Lubart. They write:
The mystical approaches to the study of creativity have probably made it harder for scientific psychologists to be heard […] We believe that it has been hard for the scientific approach to shake the deep-seated view of some people that, somehow, scientific psychologists are treading where they should not.Footnote 36
One of the university tutors I interviewed for my dissertation said that they do not use the terms ‘inspiration’ or ‘creativity’ because of their unhelpful connotations.Footnote 37 However, I believe that the mystical origins of the term ‘inspiration’ should not disqualify its use in discussion of the creative process. Psychological research has shown that it is a unique construct, and has helped to add to our understanding. One of the main findings from my research is the importance of understanding and being critical of one's beliefs about the creative process. If one finds that their beliefs have been hindering their work, then this is an opportunity to explore other, more helpful, ideas. However, if one finds that their beliefs are helpful to their work, then these shouldn't be discouraged, whether they are scientific or mystical, based off enduring models, or entirely from personal experience.
Conclusion
In 2018, Zoe Hendon and Linda Sandino conducted interviews with MA Textile Design students from Chelsea College of Arts (one of the courses I now support as a subject librarian) about inspiring objects they found in the collection of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA). The students found that talking about the objects helped them become, ‘more reflexive and self-aware of their practice’, and the researchers found that the importance of the dialogue between student, object, and interviewer to the inspiration process was a ‘significant outcome of the research.’Footnote 38
The intention of this article is to similarly spark dialogues about understanding, finding, and fostering inspiration. Working on this project has led me to look critically at my own creative process, examining how I work, what I believe about inspiration, and whether these beliefs have helped or hindered me. I hope this article prompts those who are interested to explore the topic further, helping them to better understand their own creative process and that of their library users.
