With few exceptions, scholarship on creativity has focused on its positive aspects while largely ignoring its dark side. This includes not only creativity deliberately aimed at hurting others, such as crime or terrorism, or at gaining unfair advantages, but also the accidental negative side effects of well-intentioned acts. This book brings together essays written by experts from various fields (psychology, criminal justice, sociology, engineering, education, history, and design) and with different interests (personality development, mental health, deviant behavior, law enforcement, and counter-terrorism) to illustrate the nature of negative creativity, examine its variants, call attention to its dangers, and draw conclusions about how to prevent it or protect society from its effects.
Associate Professor David Cropley is an internationally recognised expert in creativity and innovation. He has published 6 books and many chapters and papers on topics including engineering creativity, creativity and crime, organisational creativity and innovation. David Cropley was a scientific consultant and featured creativity expert in the ABC (Australia) documentaries Redesign My Brain (2013), Life at 9 (2014), and Redesign My Brain, Series 2 (2015). He consults on innovation to companies in Europe and Australia, and is also a regular keynote speaker and creativity facilitator for a wide range of business organisations, government departments and schools.
Professor Arthur Cropley obtained his PhD from the University of Alberta (Canada) in 1965 and taught at the Universities of Regina (Canada) and Hamburg (Germany), with brief stints in Australia. He has also lectured in Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, France, Latvia, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the USA. After becoming Professor Emeritus on April 1, 1999, he was Adjunct Professor of Engineering at the University of South Australia for six years and also became visiting professor at the University of Latvia. He was founding editor of High Ability Studies and is on the board of the Creativity Research Journal. He has received awards and fellowships, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Latvia. In 2004, he received the Order of the Three Stars from the President of Latvia. He has published extensively on creativity and is the author of 25 books, with translations into a dozen languages including Hungarian, Latvian, Chinese and Korean. He has become increasingly interested in recent years in using creativity concepts to examine areas not usually associated with creativity (such as engineering) and has looked closely at the dark side of creativity, and particularly crime.
