The creative process has many facets and can be understood and practiced from many different vantage points. The Four Step model emphasizes the activity of recreation between each stage of the creative process and shows this recreation as a wave and a particle phenomenon, linear and nonlinear approaches.

Here are the elements:

Vision. Create a vision for what you want to create.

Template. Create a template for your creation, in words, symbols, pictures, 3D, or some other physical medium. This template should represent your vision and be able to communicate its essence to others.

Act. Make the creation real. Take the necessary steps to bring it into the world.

Feedback. Discover how well the creation performs in the world. Does it fulfill your vision? How do others like it? Does it inspire new visions in you or in others?

Recreate. Between each of the steps, you must recreate what it is you are trying to do given the different and unique parameters of each of these different steps.

Now, the model becomes more complex, and more interesting, when we begin to look at the white spaces between the steps of the model. What happens as vision becomes a template becomes reality becomes feedback becomes a vision?

Each of the stages of this model are fundamentally different creatures. A vision is a shifting collection of ideas, impressions, memories, senses, images and feelings. A template is a piece that represents a whole. It is a slice of reality or a slice of an idea. Either way it is an attempt to represent the essence of a whole or the essential elements of a whole (according to the modeler) in a physical form, whether it be words, sketches or a more material representation.

A real creation (created through Action) is a living, breathing entity. It exists in relationships to the world, and is subject to real world limitations and influences. It is a representation of the whole of which the template is but a slice. In the feedback stage, the creation is utterly independent. It exists and is part of the world, to be judged and measured like any other part of the environment. It is no longer connected to the creator or to the vision. Its purpose now is to do what it does.

Each of these stages is fundamentally different so there must be a whole new creative process, a re-creation, between each stage of the model. This look at the model places much more emphasis on the act of recreation. Recreation is the center out of which each of the stages is launched and back to which each stage returns before being recreated into the next stage.

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