Creativity

After 25 years of teaching undergraduates, Douglas A. Bernstein, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois, thought he had heard every possible excuse for missed exams and late term papers. Right. So as a lark, Bernstein decided to use his electronic mail network to collect what he now thinks of as a Student Excuse Hall of Fame. Here are some of his favorites. (Feel free to save them for your next mental health day.

Don't tell Kazuhiko Nishi that Japanese people aren't creative. After all, he's the charismatic Wunderkind--the "Steve Jobs of Japan"--who dropped out of a prestigious university to become the nation's chief evangelist of the personal computer revolution. At age 21, in 1977, he started a computer magazine publishing firm. Renamed ASCII Corp., it is now Japan's largest software publishing firm. At 22, he talked Microsoft Corp. into making him its sole agent in Japan. At 23, he persuaded NEC Corp.

Soon after Leslie G. McCraw Jr. was appointed president of Fluor Corp.'s main subsidiary in 1986, he invited a group of children to meet with his top managers to brainstorm solutions to a thorny problem confronting the company. The fourth- and fifth-graders helped his managers become imaginative in developing fresh ideas about a large, under-utilized building in Texas that was costing the engineering and construction firm millions of dollars a year.

It's tough enough to be creative in good times. Now, with the Persian Gulf War raging, those who create ads face a host of roadblocks in developing new ads--and airing current ones. "We're closely looking at all creative work to see if any of it might not match the mood of the country," said Steve Hayden, chairman and chief creative officer at the ad firm BBDO/Los Angeles. "Every piece of copy going out of here we look at in context of the war."

You know how your mother told you to throw out your comic books and stop playing all those video games or you'd never amount to anything? Boy, was she wrong. The boom in multimedia companies--the firms that make computer graphics, CD-ROM games and animation for films and television--has created a voracious market for talent. Especially young talent familiar with art, pop culture and games, who can draw and who know computers.

Bill Docking is an artist who lives and works alone in his Fullerton home. However, unlike most traditional artists who create a studio on the inside , Docking's studio is outside, under a maple tree, or perhaps, if the mood hits him, under the oak. Or maybe it's a day to be beside the conifers in the front yard. Then again, he could just as easily be found in his garage, working late into the night on his lathe or jigsaw.

At Chelsea Passage, an eager saleswoman shows a somewhat wary customer how to set a table using the store's avant-garde housewares. "We don't believe in conformity," she says, encouraging the young woman to mix and match different colored place mats. "You're making an assumption. Not everyone is creative," the woman says with a laugh. "We think they are," insists the clerk.

Walk among the artists as they create their fine art and master craft pieces at Laguna Beach's 44th Annual Art-A-Fair Festival. The juried art of 125 international, national and local artists — plus workshops taught by AAF artists — is the focus of this two-month-long celebration of creativity. Laguna Canyon, 777 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. 10 a.m.- 10 p.m. Fri. and Sat. 10 a.m.- 9 p.m. Sun.-Thu. through Aug. 29. $7. (949) 494-4514, http://www.art-a-fair.com.

For centuries, people have talked about a connection between creativity and madness. Socrates and Winston Churchill, Edgar Allan Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Michelangelo and Vincent Van Gogh. They are but a few of the highly creative individuals who are known to have suffered from some form of mental illness.

It takes a certain amount of bravery to organize a conference around a question as ephemeral as the role of creativity in the artistic process. But in San Francisco earlier this month, 3000 people proved willing to pay $45 to $75 apiece to probe this mystery, or at least to hear an odd collection of the chic and famous expound on the meaning of life in the Digital Age.