Creative practitioners are... what?

"Creative practitioners are people who make art"

"No, creative practitioners are limited by a certain set of restrictions, because there is an economic requirements"

"Creative practitioners are artists who are financially independent"

I sat there in the first class for CIM405, The Creative Practitioner a little bit taken aback. During my search leading up to this class I had done some vague looking into what exactly a creative practitioner was, and found myself drawing a blank. But it honestly felt like everyone else had a concrete idea of exactly what we were talking about. Not really having anything to add to the conversation I listened, hoping to get an idea. But nothing came.

It wasn't until after the class, a little bit disappointed in myself for not being able to contribute I had decided to just jump into the weekly activities, that I suddenly started to get a solid idea. One of the videos that had been linked as watching material entitled "3 tools to become more creative | Balder Onarheim | TEDxCopenhagenSalon" was focusing on practicing creativity, training it as a skill to help become more creative in your own jobs.

Video thumbnail — 3 tools to become more creative

It hit me, it was a lot simpler than I thought. Please excuse the unhelpful way of phrasing this, but a creative practitioner is simply someone who practices creativity. The trigger for this original thought was Sian's comment of "Oh artists are a subset of creative practitioners" (excuse the paraphrasing).

So my conclusion to this conundrum, this seemingly vague topic is that it's not vague, it's just broad. It may be better to explain my thoughts with some examples:

A coder who has the complex task for reducing the CPU cost for an animation by coming up with some new workarounds based off their knowledge of the CPU architecture is practicing creativity
A baker who experiments with a new blend of flour and spices to make a more savoury bread is practicing creativity
An engineer who improves efficiency by experimenting is practicing creativity
A teacher who notices some interesting feedback from students and so plays around with some ideas they had about delivery of materials in order to improve student retention is practicing creativity

Is that making sense? A creative practitioner is not a job title, it's not an artist (at least not in the traditional sense), it's simply some one that practices creativity in their daily work.