Kia has launched Creativity Drive, an exploration of what makes each of us special: creativity. But more than this, Creativity Drive represents Kia’s ambition to promote and safeguard creativity for future generations. To achieve this, Kia has teamed up with leading innovators, creators, and educators to explore ways to help foster creativity in children’s development. Inspiration for Kia’s Creativity Drive campaign comes following several recent studies that have shown how individual creativity declines from childhood. A report from Dr George Land and Beth Jarman on behalf of NASA* recently highlighted that most adults are 96% less creative than a five-year-old. It appears that the way we are taught represses our creativity as we get older.
In response to this, Kia recently hosted ‘The Kia Hackathon’, a two-day virtual event with the aim to solve a challenge that is important to all of society; How can we instigate change so that creativity is recognised to be as important as literacy in young people’s education? Facilitated by Swedish transformative learning specialists, Hyper Island, the event brought together Kia creatives, education experts and creators to address this challenge. The Kia Hackathon participants were split into three teams. Each team included one of three innovative creators who push boundaries and harness creativity in their everyday lives: Dr Merritt Moore, an American professional ballerina and quantum physicist; Lucy McCrae, a science fiction artist, filmmaker, inventor and body architect; and Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun, an award-winning designer of experiences, filmmaker, artist, public speaker and researcher. Over a 2-day period, the teams discussed, debated and developed their ideas before presenting their solutions to a judging panel chaired by Gregory Guillaume, Vice President of Kia Design Center Europe. Out of the three visionary solutions that the teams presented during the Kia Hackathon, the strongest was as intuitive as it was brilliant. It is based on the simple premise that our educational systems focus primarily on teaching children to know the right answers to fixed questions. Instead, the team suggested, encouraging children to freely ask questions, is a much more effective way to promote creativity and problem solving. This premise led the team to an idea that use cards to encourage children to ask more questions. Kia will now work alongside creative partners and other experts to develop and implement this idea in field trials across Europe to ensure it is an inspiring and effective tool to help make future generations more creative.
Jason Jeong, President at Kia Europe, commented: “Kia believes in the power of innovation, inspiration and creativity, and I see this daily at Kia as we continue to create more progressive, sustainable mobility solutions. Through Kia´s Creativity Drive, we want to support young people around the world to be as creative as their minds will allow. For society to continue progressing, we believe that creativity needs not only to survive, but also to flourish in the minds of future generations”. Kia’s Creativity Drive comes shortly after Kia’s brand relaunch from earlier this year that saw the adoption of a new corporate logo, brand slogan and all-new design philosophy – Opposites United. Kia’s bold transformation and brand purpose aims to establish a leading position in the future mobility industry by revamping nearly all facets of its business, from branding and design to functionality, technology, user experience and sustainable performance. Technological creativity was key when developing the Kia EV6, the first car to launch under Kia’s new brand strategy. The stylish crossover features advanced 800V fast-charging capabilities that will enable a 10 to 80 percent charge in just 18 minutes, along with a potential real-world driving range of over 510 kilometres. The Kia EV6 is the first dedicated BEV produced by Kia using its all-new Electric-Global Modular Platform (E-GMP) and the company plans to strengthen its EV line-up with 11 new BEV models by 2026 – seven built on E-GMP architecture, and four derivative EVs based on existing models. Order books for the Kia EV6 are now open, with first deliveries expected across Europe in the fourth quarter of 2021.
