Gerhard
Fischer,
There
is overwhelming evidence that research on creativity should be grounded in the
basic assumption that power of the unaided individual mind is highly overrated.
[John-Steiner, 2000]. Although creative individuals are often thought of as
working in isolation, much of our intelligence and creativity results from
interaction and collaboration with other individuals, with their tools and with
their artifacts [Csikszentmihalyi, 1996]. In
many traditional approaches, human
cognition has been seen as existing solely “inside” a person’s head, and
studies on cognition have often disregarded the physical and social
surroundings in which cognition takes place. Distributed intelligence [Fischer, 2005; Hollan
et al., 2001; Salomon, 1993] provides an effective theoretical framework for
understanding what humans can achieve and how artifacts, tools, and
socio-technical environments can be designed and evaluated to empower human
beings and to change tasks.
Individual Creativity. The
claim by Csikszentmihályi [Csikszentmihalyi, 1996] that “an idea or
product that deserves the label ‘creative’ arises from the synergy of many
sources and not only from the mind of a single person”, does not exclude
individual creativity. Creative individuals can make a difference, as analyzed
and shown by Gardner [Gardner, 1995] in exemplary cases, such as movie directors, champions of
sports teams, and leading scientists and politicians. Individual creativity comes from the unique perspective that the individual
brings to bear in the current problem or situation. It is the result of the
life experience, culture, education, and background knowledge that the
individual has, as well as the personal meaningfulness that the individual
finds in the current situation. Creative actions cannot be completely planned
actions; rather, they can only be situated actions, after reflecting upon the
situational talk-back of the environments, either technical or social [Schön, 1983]. Therefore, individual creativity
can be greatly enhanced by providing appropriate socio-technical environments [Mumford, 1987]. Creativity flourishes best in a
unique kind of social environment: one that is stable enough to allow
continuity of effort, yet diverse and broad-minded enough to nourish creativity
in all its subversive forms.
Social
Creativity.
Much human creativity arises from activities that take place in a social
context in which interactions with other people and the shared artifacts are
important contributors to the process. Social creativity comes alive in
socio-technical environments in which communities collaborate.
Communities
can be characterized by distances and diversity and by the resulting division of labor [Levy & Murnane, 2004], among individuals who have unique experiences, varying
interests, and different perspectives about problems, and who use different
knowledge systems in their work. Shared understanding that supports
collaborative learning and working requires the active construction of a
knowledge system in which the meanings of concepts and objects can be debated
and resolved. In heterogeneous design communities, such as those that form
around large and complex design problems, the construction of shared
understanding requires the interaction and synthesis of several separate
knowledge systems.
Distances and diversity should not be considered
as constraints to deal with but as opportunity to generate new ideas, new
insights, and new environments [National-Research-Council,
2003]. The challenge is often
not to reduce heterogeneity and specialization, but to support it, manage it,
and integrate it by finding ways to build bridges between local knowledge
sources and by exploiting conceptual collisions and breakdowns as sources for
innovation. Social creativity can be distributed (1) spatially (across physical distance),
(2) temporally (across time), and (3)
conceptually (across different
communities), and (4) technologically
(between persons and artifacts) [Fischer, 2005]. This distributed fabric of interactions can be supported by
integrating diversity, making all voices heard, increasing the back-talk of the
situation, and providing systems that are open and transparent, so that people
can be aware of and access each other’s work, relate it to their own work,
transcend the information given, and contribute the results back to the
community (as illustrated by the “collect / relate / create / donate” model [Shneiderman, 2002]).
Integrating Individual
and Social Creativity. Creativity research should be grounded in the basic
assumption that there is an “and” and
not a “versus” relationship between
individual and social creativity. Individual and social creativity can be
integrated by means of proper collaboration models, appropriate community
structures, boundary objects, process models in support of natural evolution of
artifacts, and meta-design [Fischer et al., 2005]. By integrating individual and social creativity, support
can be provided not only for reflective practitioners but also for reflective communities.
Towards a Enriched
Framework for Creativity
To design the creativity support tools of the
future requires an enriched framework for creativity. The following paragraphs
describe some specific dimensions of such a framework (obviously many more
dimensions exist and need to be developed and articulated).
Externalizations are critically more
important for social interactions because groups have “no head”. Externalizations support creativity
based on: (1) they produce a record of our mental efforts that is outside us
rather than vaguely in memory; (2) they cause us
to move from vague mental conceptualizations of an idea to a more concrete
representation of it, creating situational back-talk and making thoughts and intentions more accessible to reflection; (3)
they
provide a means for others to interact with, react to, negotiate around, and
build upon an idea; and they contribute to a common language of
understanding.
Meta-Design. To bring social
creativity alive, media and environments must support meta-design. Meta-design [Fischer et al., 2004] characterizes objectives, techniques, and processes to
allow users to act as designers and be creative. The need for meta-design is
founded on the observation that creativity requires open systems that users can
modify and evolve. Because problems cannot be completely anticipated at design
time when a system is developed, users at use time will discover mismatches
between their problems and the support that a system provides. These mismatches
(perceived as breakdowns and conceptual collisions) serve as potential sources for new
insights, new knowledge, and new understanding. Meta-design advocates a shift in focus from finished
products or complete solutions to conditions, contexts, and tools
for users that allow them to be creative in further evolving artifacts and
organizations [Hippel, 2005].
Meta-design
supports informed participation in
which participants from all walks of life (not just skilled computer
professionals) transcend beyond the information given to incrementally acquire
ownership in problems and to contribute actively to their solutions. It
addresses the challenges associated with open-ended and multidisciplinary problems.
Meta-design requires active contributors
(people acting as designers in personally meaningful activities), not just
consumers [Fischer, 2002]. Creativity needs the “synergy of many”, and this kind of
synergy is facilitated by meta-design. However, a tension exists between
creativity and organization. A defining characteristic of social creativity is
that it transcends individual creativity and thus requires some form of
organization; but elements of organization can and frequently do stifle
creativity [Florida, 2002].
From Reflective
Practitioners to Reflective Communities. The objective to educate “Renaissance
scholars” (such as Leonardo da Vinci, who was equally adept in the arts and the
sciences [Shneiderman, 2002]) is not reasonable in today’s world [National-Research-Council,
2003]. We need to invent
alternative social organizations that will support “collective comprehensiveness through overlapping patterns of unique
narrowness” [Campbell, 2005] by integrating different interdisciplinary specialties
which are partially overlapping with each other. Such an architecture will
provide a foundation that people can understand each other based on common ground
but at the same time their expertise will be complementary because they will
know different things. This architecture will allow us to move beyond the
isolated image of the reflective practitioner towards the sustainability and
development of reflective communities.
From Given Tasks to Personally Meaningful Activities. To motivate people to become active contributors and
designers and share their knowledge requires a new “design culture”, involving
a mindset change [Fischer, 2002] and principles of social
capital accumulation [Florida, 2002]. But before new social mindsets and expectations can
emerge, users’ active participation must be a function of simple motivational
mechanisms and activities considered personally
meaningful. Sustaining personally meaningful activities is essential for
creativity. People are willing to spend considerable effort on things that are
important to them. The value dimension for truly personal meaningful activities
is more important than the effort dimension.
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of Creativity & Cognition, London, April, pp. 128-136.
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Creativity," International Journal
of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS) Special Issue on Creativity (eds: Linda Candy
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Development," Communications of the
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