Complex-systems theories of creativity emerged in the 1980s, acknowledging creativity as a socially situated process. Psychological studies recognized that people work within particular social structures, which influences creativity (Amabile, 1983, 1996) and creative products are evaluated by members of a person’s field through consensual assessment (Feldman et al., 1994). The material environment remains mostly disregarded. Amabile (1998) argued the physical workplace setting does not play any significant role in creativity. Csikszentmihalyi (1996, p. 135) suggested the material environment is important for creativity, but it may be impossible to empirically explain how it might catalyze creative processes. Developments in 4E cognition have informed complex systems frameworks for two recent studies of embodied creativity. Both examined the materiality of creative practices compared across domains of visual and performing arts, design, writing, and science. First, Glăveanu et al. (2013) proposed an action framework based on Dewey’s (1934) experiential learning theory to guide qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with 60 artists, musicians, designers, writers, and scientists. They propose that creative acts typically begin with an impulse, which varies by domain (e.g., to express, to solve a problem, etc.). Material and methodological constraints on creative acts constitute experiences through which the creator gains awareness until eventually achieving emotional fulfillment and professional satisfaction. Malinin (2016) included the architectural environment in her analysis of accounts by creative professionals for evidence of embedded, embodied, and enactive cognition. The resulting theoretical framework, grounded in Gibson’s (1977) affordance theory, describes how creative niche construction (umwelt) is constituted through person-environment coupling. She found creatives habitually exploit features and qualities of their material environments to engender, sustain, and curtail different modes of creativity, enhancing creative productivity. The materiality of creative practices across domains is apparent in both studies of creativity in situ, suggesting it may be time to finally leave behind purely mental models that focus on divergent and convergent thinking in favor of DST approaches. Furthermore, the theoretical frameworks developed from these studies suggest that person-material-environment interactions – doing-and-undergoing (Glăveanu et al., 2013) or perceiving-in-action (Malinin, 2016) – constitute transformative creative experiences.
The idea that creativity is emergent and distributed between people and artifacts is not a new concept in improvisational performing arts, such as comedy theater (Sawyer, 1999; Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009), music (Walton et al., 2014, 2015, 2018; Schiavio and Van der Schyff, 2018; van der Schyff et al., 2018), or partner-dance (Kimmel et al., 2018; McClure, 2018). Sawyer’s (1999) seminal study of theatrical improvisational was informed by Hutchins’s (1995) theory of distributed cognition. Hutchins argued that the best way to understand embodied activity is to study real world processes by observing people in their workplaces. Through this methodology he illustrated how real-world problem solving, which he called “cognition-in-the-wild,” is distributed between people and artifacts. Improvisational creativity is unique; the process is the creative product and activities are interactional and unpredictable (Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009). Temporal, observational studies of improvisational performances reveal some common principles about person-environment interactions during this type of creativity:
• Creative synergies emerge without prior planning or scripting and cannot be attributed to the intentions or actions of any particular participant (Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009; Kimmel et al., 2018).
• There is moment-to-moment contingency where each action depends on the one just prior and any action can be changed by subsequent actions (Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009; van der Schyff et al., 2018).
• Cultivation of embodied perception — acquired through a repertoire of bits/motifs (relatively stable interactional routines) — increases potential for novelty (Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009; Kimmel et al., 2018; McClure, 2018).
• Interactions constitute micro-affordances, which enact meaning for participants (Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009; Kimmel et al., 2018).
• Creativity is a complex system constrained by interactions (Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009); constraint lies in the structure of the partnership (Walton et al., 2015; McClure, 2018; van der Schyff et al., 2018) and the setting (van der Schyff et al., 2018; Walton et al., 2018).
• Higher level structures emerge, exhibiting global system behavior (Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009); the creative group becomes so tightly coordinated that they behave as a single entity and not a collection of individuals (Walton et al., 2014, 2015).
• Social and material interactions are reciprocal; the creative process is transformative (Glăveanu et al., 2013; van der Schyff et al., 2018).
Design creativity has also been examined as a type of improvisational performance between actor and materials of a creative situation (Schön, 1983; Pereira and Tschimmel, 2012; Choi and DiPaola, 2013; Rietveld and Brouwers, 2017; Baber et al., 2019). Baber et al. (2019) used a RECS framework to study jewelry design. They analyzed data from interviews, motion capture, and sensors fitted to tools to understand how artifacts (tools, equipment, materials, and workplace) shape creative activity, finding jewelry design involves more technological reasoning than abstract reasoning. They propose that (a) creativity is a physical act where action and perception are intertwined, (b) creativity emerges through incremental insight as responses to changing situational cues, (c) it involves a repertoire of responses to situational cues and constraints, and (d) constraints are necessary, but too many inhibit creativity. Like research on improvisational arts, their study demonstrates how creativity is emergent and distributed between actor and artifacts. Pereira and Tschimmel (2012) also found jewelry making to be an emergent phenomenon. They suggest perception is at the core of creativity, which might emerge through confused perception (such as Beethoven’s deafness), malfunctioning perception (such as with mental illness), and intentional perception, developed through expertise and use of strategies like associative and analogical thinking. Rietveld and Brouwers (2017), in their ethnography of architectural practice, noted that architects also continually shift perspectives to perceive new affordances in a creative situation. Some ways this is done in both jewelry making and architecture include ideation drawing and tool use.
Baber et al. (2019) propose that designers instantiate events by creating ideation sketches. Chemero (2000), Chemero et al. (2003) defines events as “changes in the layout of affordances” in the actor-environment system. Affordances are relations between the particular skills and abilities of the actor with respect to features and qualities of the environment (Chemero, 2003). Ideation drawings create changes in the affordances of the design situation, helping the designer explore concepts and perceive new opportunities to act upon. Drawings can expand the problem space because they allow designers to abstract ideas, emphasizing or disregarding aspects of the problem (Pereira and Tschimmel, 2012). In architecture, drawings and model making are both abstractions; the designer is unable to perceive affordances from the creative product itself because others build it after the design is finalized. Construction drawings are a blueprint from which to build the final product, but ideation drawings are physical forms of problem solving. Models serve a similar role in architecture, as abstracted, physical ideation (Yaneva, 2009, p. 57; Malinin, 2016). In jewelry making, however, the designer is able to also directly work with the materials of the final product.
Research on improvisational performance and design practices provides evidence that creativity does not begin with an idea in the head that is subsequently realized; it emerges through interactions with others and artifacts of the material environment. There is some evidence to suggest that other forms of creativity are similarly emergent and distributed, such as scientific (Watson, 1968; Gruber, 1981; Glăveanu et al., 2013; Malinin, 2016) and literary (Kipling, 1937; Glăveanu et al., 2013; Malinin, 2016) domains. Studies of real-world creativity also demonstrate how the phenomenon is transformative. Expertise changes perceptional abilities, instantiating events change affordances to be perceived, affordances provide opportunities for actions that shape creative products, which, in turn, change the creator. Creativity, thusly, can be characterized as a dynamical system encompassing brain, body and world — in line with the RECS perspective. However, the question of whether creativity requires mental representation remains.
No comments:
Post a Comment