- Sep 2024
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dl.acm.org dl.acm.org
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From this collaborative view, the richness of knowledge emerges from close interactions with other individuals and the environment. In
In-Soo Choe found that in Korea, educators said the "least likely to be creative" students were seen as "selfish" and likely to "stay alone"; on the other hand, Korean adults associated creativity with "deviant loners", in line with the popular Confusion belief systems. Korean youth, Choe found, were more likely to agree with the educators - a view that might be adapted from Western thought.
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The creative process begins “when a problem has occured” [50].
to begin the creative process when a problem has occurred may also speak to disruptive innovation culture within the tech world and creative economy in business.
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While we do not assume full coverage of all creativity notions out there, we consider the ones we highlight to be integral to any discussion of “what qualifies as creative work?”
in critique, one might think of Audre Lorde's for the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house; in considering how designers define creativity, whose voices are amplified and laid as foundational groundwork is imperative to the conversation.
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ontological
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technologies are “part of larger sociotechnical entanglements and thus give rise to knowledge and practices that are partial, situated, embedded and embodied, as well as implicated in a broader nexus of power relations”
in Art on My Mind, bell hooks contends that discussing power and access related to race, gender, and class within the artworld is crucial in a time where nationalism, fascism, fundamentalism are on the rise;
this is as poignant as it was in 1995, nearly 30 years ago, as it is today; one might even argue even more critical to apply to the design/HCI world with the advent of internet and social media;
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nstead of seeing an artwork as the work of an isolated genius, he sees it as the result of interactions between the artist and the world. Not only does every piece of art rely on “extensive division of labor”, it has a “social origin”, and all these forces play a critical role in shaping the final work.
in Art on my Mind bell hooks challenges the assumption that Black artistic genius stems from the single person overcoming odds; here, the authors similarly recognize that in actuality, there are many societal, cultural, collaborative influence that shape creation.
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A rich body of design works have highlighted the alternative forms of creative work that arise from unsettling entrenched metaphors and values.
numerous projects have show how new types of creation can stem by challenging norms; Margaret Boden calls this transformational creativity, as the creation is unable to be complete within existing structures.
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Accounts of situated action in creative contexts can be observed in jazz improvisation where the musician pulls from pre-existing repertoire of musical ideas to respond spontaneously to a highly dynamic environment.
similarly, Margaret Boden assigns this situated action into the conceptual space; in any field, there are underlying structures a person pulls from to create "spontaneously" - jazz, chess, and molecular structures are examples;
carl sagan famously relayed that we are all stardust; all of creation is the remix of the same chemicals that make up the entire universe.
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Studies have shown that novel properties can emerge from conceptual combination of existing ideas [48].
novelty itself, similar to innovation or progress are value-driven terms that often have positive connotations; as designers, we may assume that novelty is always good; there are numerous examples of 'dark' or 'immoral' examples of creativity; this is especially poignant now at the intersection of creativity and technology due to how "creative" scam artists are becoming or how "creative" a scam is;
others posit that rather than value being inherently good, value can be assigned if it's *effective as a means to it's intended end" see Explicating ‘creativity’, Paisley Livingston
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simple processes can make novel discoveries
It is important to note that throughout the authors' research, novelty is an assumed quality interwoven into the concept of creativity. This assumption has been deeply explored by philosophers.
Margaret Boden, also mentioned by the authors in this research, relays that there are two types of "novelty": P-Creative ( psychologically creative) where something is new to one and H-Creative (historically creative) where something is new to all; much of the novelty talked about throughout this research is the striving toward historically creative ideas and endeavors; although one might argue that the psychologically creative is more accessible and common.
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Bricoleur
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biographical prototypes
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ultimate particulars
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Elizabeth Tunstall
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This shows that defining the “nature of work” [132] is a nexus of politics.
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Bennett
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Suchman
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Cartesian dualism
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This essay calls on HCI researchers and creativity researchers to reflect on the role of computing in the emergence and transformation of creative practices. It also aims to capture the attention of critical scholars, inviting them to investigate creative technology as a sociotechnical phenomena.
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Turkle and Papert
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Marshall
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ethnographic
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universalism
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Star
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supercomputer Watson
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Mackay
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Ron Baecker
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phenomenology
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Lucy Suchman
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Jacobs
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Xia
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Klemmer
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John Dewey
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Gibson
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Polanyi
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recombinant information
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generative agent
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Sawyer
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Schon
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Wallas
Graham Wallas' work was heavily influenced by many sources, including Aristotle, William James, John Dewey, Wilhelm Wundt, Sigmund Freud, Hermann von Helmholtz, Henri Poincaré; while Wallas' work is no doubt integral, it is important to note the structures of power and privilege that this list embodies.
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Coughlan
Tim Coughlan, University at Bath; work is focused on the design and evaluation of systems that support inclusion, creativity, and openness in learning.
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Gabora
cognitive scientist Lee Gabora's work looks at how culture changes over time, how people come up with new ideas, and how this helps culture change.
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“an associative mode of perceiving metaphoric connections between correlating items in memory, and an analytic mode that is conducive to understanding cause and effect relationships”
there are two ways of thinking: the first assists in seeing creative links between ideas and the second assists in understanding how one idea leads to another (i.e cause and effect).
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Guilford’s noteworthy address to the American Psychological Association in 1950
the 1950 speech on creativity by Guilford can also be looked at through a societal and cultural lens, as he made it at a crucial time - post WW2, the beginnings of Cold War tensions; a time where conformity was encouraged and critical thought / dissent was feared.
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Guilford
Joy Paul Guildford, American Psychologist
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An example result of the creative cognition approach is a cognitive model called Geneplore
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Becoming sensitized to these epistemological differences enables us to discern which aspects of creative work is emphasized more than others and see how hierarchies of knowledge get constructed.
in exploring how our foundations of knowledge are built, we can dissect how we assign value or rank to knowledge - or generally accepted assumptions.
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tools for ideation are frequently distinct from tools for implementation, often lacking the capability to seamlessly transfer data between them
this is often seen in common design tools; is it a product of capitalism? Is the market afraid of standardization? In the transfer of one product to another?
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This perpetuates seeing the “support staff” as merely a resource (rather than central to the creative process), whose work can be replaced.
designs solely generated by models are not informed by the complex human interaction in the design process, by designers.
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This emphasis on “acting through the interface” [19] sees technology as acting as an extension of the artist or designer using the tool.
tech is integral to creative process - well designed tech is about ease of use and integration.
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The third wave or the third paradigm [70] shares many of the same assumptions as the second wave – i.e. the centrality of the physical world in our construction of meaning – with a stronger focus on the various abilities of the human body.
focus on physical abilities / senses shape novelty in interaction.
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The shift in perspective toward the social in psychology covered in the previous embodied action view of creativity resembles an analogous trend in HCI’s “second wave theories”.
focus on group work and social contexts of digital environments.
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The tool-mediated expert activity view of creative work focuses on supporting (expert) creative practices through tools. Activity theory
There are many philosophical theories that explore computers as a tool that are extensions of humans. In some circles, humans have become cyborgs in that sense - they cannot be separated from the tools they use every single day.
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By reframing the basic questions about creativity, this view “de-emphasizes internal processes and individual contributions and instead places much more emphasis on collaborative creativity”
asking "where is creativity" de-centers individuals and centers collaboration. In building upon this foundation, it means that the designer is not designing in isolation but among others.
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Since the 1980s, creativity research in psychology has moved away from “univariate, positivist research paradigms” to “more complex, constructivistic, systems-oriented research models” [56].
creativity research has evolved from simple, individual-focused approach to an increasingly complex, systems-oriented approach that centers social interactions and artifacts. This has attracted sociologists.
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In other words, moment-to-moment creative actions draw from a large pool of embodied resources, relying on tacit analysis of the fit between the resource and the situation at any given moment.
In the moment, creativity relies on constant adjustments based on intuition - an intuition that is formed based on prior experience.
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In addition to the primacy of interacting with the physical world through our bodies, the embodied view of creative work also highlights the role of the body in partnership with the dynamic situation, i.e. the moment-to-moment actions people take in response to different contingencies.
Creativity benefits from interacting with the environmental and adapting to environmental changes.
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Creative work as reflective practice focuses on the “importance of physical and artifact-centered action in the world to aid thought”
Artifact interaction enriches design processes by grounding it in real world experience.
But what of the bias toward familiar materials? Asking a blacksmith to prototype a house and you might find yourself living in a tin can.
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That view of creativity neglects the role the body and the physical world play during the creative process as well as the social context in which creativity takes place.
As mentioned earlier, creativity doesn't happen in a vacuum - there is a plethora of societal and culture context which any designer exists in.
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They do not subscribe to the thinking that “geniuses use cognitive processes that are radically different from those employed by most individuals and that may not be accessible to the methods of cognitive science”
Creativity comes from common mental processes that everyone uses - all creativity (aka problem-solving) relies on the same basic principles. Creativity is, then, accessible to anyone, because it just depends on how you mix and match those principles.
Intertwined within each person are emotional, cultural, and experiential factors that inform and, at times, limit their creativity.
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This ostensibly narrow focal point paved way for various intellectual interventions later.
Creativity may be deterministic - models are able to reproduce design, style, and recreate scenes - things that are associated with being inherently "human". Generative models are optimizing for a particular function - ultimately serving a higher purpose.
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The historical backdrop to these ideas of “scientizing” the design process can be traced to the period following World War II in the United States.
So much of "creative" innovation seems to be derived from capitalistic and nationalistic ideals that are driven by a fear of inferiority or destruction.
Not mentioned here by name is the race to dominate space flight from the mid-50s to mid-70s. It is also worth mentioning that industrialization, World War I, and World War II was heavily influenced by the very same rhetoric that came from post WWII thinking.
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“Most opinion among design methodologists and among designers holds that the act of designing itself is not and will not ever be a scientific activity; that is, that designing is itself a nonscientific or a-scientific activity”.
design isn't scientific but concedes that scientific methods can formalize design.
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Proponents of this movement stood on the spectrum with regards to how close they placed design next to science. On the looser end, design is viewed simply as “systematic design”, or, “the procedures of designing organized in a systematic way”
asks is creativity connected to science or science?
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In other words, creative work is about “devis[ing] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”
In creativity, problem solvers choose the best tool for the job using their own foundational knowledge they've acquired over their education or career. Building upon this, what tool an individual selects to solve a problem may be based on prior values and assumptions.
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Bacchi
feminist political theory researcher Carol Bacchi is well known for her analytic strategy for policy theory.
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convergent and divergent thinking
convergent thinking refers to working through proposed ideas and finding the best option; divergent thinking refers to throwing any and all ideas to the wall to see what sticks.
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Shneiderman’s design principles for creativity support tools
Ben Shneiderman's work is deeply influential in HCI; his work has assisted in creating strong connections between tech and creativity, especially when applied to fostering innovation.
his 2007 national science foundation funded report on creativity support tools, led by UMD, provides a seminal overview of the definitions of creativity at that time.
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flow
in this context, flow is a psychological state of being completely absorbed in a activity that feels both effortless and challenging.
the full manuscript is dense, yet thoughtful and engaging.
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Csikszentmihalyi’s characterization of creativity as flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihaly's work is deeply influential in psychology, education, and HCI because he discusses how one can achieve higher levels of happiness by engaging in activities they find meaningful.
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Boden’s conception of creativity as “exploration and play”
Margaret Boden, research professor at University of Sussex, has provided pivotal work in the exploration of creativity using interdisciplinary research across music, game, story, physics, and artificial intelligence to explore human creativity in arts, science, and life.
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Phil Agre
American AI researcher and humanities professor known for critiques of technology.
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Therefore, similar to Ribes et al. in their study of domain [113], the epistemic positions we propose aim to provide conceptual tools for reasoning about different styles of organizing creativity-oriented research practices in HCI.
David Ribes' work explores the definition of domain in computing and data science; offers insight into how studying domains helps organize computational systems.
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The Logic of Care
Work by ethnographer Annamarie Mol; in this context, the authors emphasize that understanding action in context involves exploring the rationale that guides the practice.
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critical fabulation
refers to the movement to consider broader impacts of design work on the world; to redefine design as an active and investigative process that addresses social issues and reflects both personal and cultural contexts.
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diffraction
refers to how social theories and scientific approaches can enhance one another, leading to a more nuanced understanding of both.
Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter
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figuration
related to how connections and dependencies between people shift over time due to changes in social structures, contexts change; also see Thiele, K. Figuration.
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Harding
the authors cite Sarah Harding, a feminist, antiracist philosopher who pioneered 'standpoint theory' to describe research based on experiences of people who have been excluded from knowledge creation in the past.
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epistemic positions
epistemic position is not simply limited how one approaches the topic of knowledge; in this context, the authors build upon previous frameworks that introduce the concept of epistemic positions to explore how knowledge is unequally valued, especially in regard to race and gender, in academia.
Epistemic injustice and epistemic positioning: towards an intersectional political economy
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epistemology
the study of knowledge; a matter of understanding what knowledge is, and how to distinguish between cases in which someone knows something and cases in which someone doesn't know something. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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cognitive emergence
to generate new ideas, make associations, combine concepts in relation to ideation activities.
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embodied action
to engage with physical knowledge gained through experience and the material world around us.
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feminist epistemology
loosely organized approach to the study of knowledge stemming from feminist theory about gender and traditional epistemology (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy); here, the author utilizes this framework as a tool to challenge common assumptions that knowledge, or definitions of creativity, are entirely objective, as social factors like gender, race, and class tend to inform who is seen as a "knower".
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construals
one's perception and interpretation of their own (or others') attributes or behavior.
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pluralistic
refers to pluralism; the idea that any one thing has many facets, causes, or meanings.
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normative
pertaining to a particular standard of comparison for a person or group of people, especially when thinking of cultural ideas.
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Our goal is to bring into relief the political dimension of creative technologies.
there are many tensions, or issues, that come up when technology intersects with politics in the creative field; in doing this research, the authors hope to bring clarity or understanding to the intersection;
in this context, political dimensions refer to the ways societal norms and power impact creative technology.
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feminist values
it should be noted that feminist values is a broad topic; in this context, the author refers to the feminist school of thought that knowledge is not universal, objective, value-free, or context-independent; knowledge is influenced by what one wants, cares about, and believes.
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Positionality
in this section, the authors explain how they are academically positioned and make clear that their work is informed by their own backgrounds, assumptions, etc; they offer up their limitations for this research, including that the scope is limited to computing and digital tools; as well as drawing for a US-centric perspective.
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problematization is a “strategy for developing a critical consciousness”: it disrupts “taken-for-granted ‘truths”’ and articulates the “process” through which values are formed, thus making politics of creative computing visible.
In recent years, the human bias in creative computing has been in the forefront of ethics scholars - especially when it comes to reinforcing existing inequalities into creative computing such as design, algorithmic, or representation biases.
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We use “practice” as the unit of analysis, which describe the “intelligible background” for actions
method
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It is an essay that serves to spark reflection, discussion, and debate around the complex interplay of epistemology and technology in creative practices.
objective
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We reconstructed the four epistemic positions from a combination of HCI literature, academic research, and creative practice. We blurred the distinction between what is considered theoretical or practical material, viewing them as inherently intertwined: “practices embody systems of ideas, and such systems are not only themselves a form of practice but draw from practical experience” [38].
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We build on this work and take stock of the advances creative computing research has made over the past 23 years.
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domain expertise
deep understanding of a particular subject, including complexities and nuances.
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However, not many analytical resources exist for understanding the broader historical and theoretical underpinnings of creative computing
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Cherry and Latulipe’s [30] work on the creativity support index (CSI)
CSI allows researchers to understand not just how well a tool supports creative work overall, but what aspects of creativity support may need attention.
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a precise definition will adequately circumscribe creative work, marking out the part(s) of creative process or levels of expertise technology should support
current research looks to define creativity in hopes of understanding what parts of creation (iteration, design, execution) tech should help enhance, as well as which level of skill (beginner, intermediate, etc) tech should be catered towards.
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Creativity support has two implied referents: the person (who) and the activity (what).
the person (who) refers to one involved in the creative process while the activity (what) refers to creative activities being done.
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Identifying this vagueness, Remy et al. [112] point out that creativity can simultaneously refer to the “creativity of the outcome”, “the usability of the tool itself”, or “the productivity of the process [as mediated through] CST”.
creativity can mean different things at the same time.
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Simply put, creativity is a noun performing the work of an adjective.
to further simplify, creativity is used as a noun (a thing) but functions as an adjective (a descriptive word).
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When evaluating computer-mediated creative work, should we ask if technology is enhancing the creative person(s) –perhaps pointing toward an adoption of CST definitions such as “[computational techniques that] mak[e] people more creative more often” [124]– or should we examine how technology is facilitating the creative activity –thus suggesting the need to develop evaluation metrics for CST that are comparable to usability principles
in evaluating computer-mediated creative work, does one focus on whether tech enhances the creator or that it facilitates the creative action?
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While not explicitly delineated, it can be gleaned from their literature review that different notions of creativity serve to encapsulate different epistemological commitments, which in turn influence the researchers’ analytical stance, objects of inquiry, methodological affinities, and design practices.
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We contribute toward a critical practice of creative computing by making explicit existing glasses HCI researchers have used to conceptualize creative work.
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We argue that adopting a pluralistic and contextual perspective on epistemology, as advanced by feminist theorists can provide clarity in understanding these patterns.
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We analyze “creativity support” as a construct that encodes different definitions of creative work.
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We analyze the historical conditions under which these epistemological styles develop and how they shape and inform ideas about the role technology plays in supporting creativity.
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we articulate four epistemic positions underpinning creative computing research by disentangling diverse conceptions of creativity from psychology, cognitive science, sociology, and AI literature.
the authors break down four ways that differing fields think about creativity and find connections between them.
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As argued by Harding [68], every concept has a “subject” and that subject has a standpoint, or “a perspective involving assumptions and values based on the kinds of activities [the subject] engages in”
the way one sees or understands something depends on their experiences, assumptions, and values;
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By linking theory to practice, this work contributes toward articulating the “goals” [112] and roles for computing in creative work.
in connecting theory to practice, the authors advance understanding toward the goals and roles of using computers in creative work.
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Frich et al. [54] for example, discuss the absence of consensus regarding goals for CST, attributing it to insufficiently bounded creativity definitions. Remy et al. [112] also highlight the lack of theoretical grounding in evaluations of CST, which further contributes to the conceptual vagueness around the roles of computing in creative work.
Jonas Frich provides work on the intersection of creativity and HCI; discusses how technology advancements are redefining creative work; Christian Remy provides work on how one uses digital tools to enhance every day activities.
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we discuss strategies for integrating more feminist values into creativity-oriented HCI research
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we sketch a set of provocations about the value-laden questions implicated by each epistemic position. This serves as a starting point for reasoning about the trade-offs and politics in creative computing and research.
the authors outline questions related to the assumptions in various ways of understanding knowledge; in questioning these assumptions, the authors start a conversation about the trade-offs and politics in creative computing research.
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The main challenge for the activity view is finding a representative set of users for whom the tool is designed.
how can one design tools when it is based on isolated moments of interaction (i.e in user studies, etc) when it ignores broader contexts of history and environment?
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Turkle and Papert use the case to reevaluate how programming is taught, but it can just as easily be applied to illustrate the need for tools to accommodate diverse work styles.
the "geniuses" of art are often seen as the ones who are rejecting how the prevailing, popular artists are creating. The most "successful" tech giants are "disrupting" structures that we are taught are "norms". How can we design tools that are "innovative" or "representative" if they are designed as if all designers are a monolith?
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Research practices influenced by this view are informed by the notion of external representation of ideas in physical objects and its significance in the creative process.
These interfaces are also seen in simulator games - both for fun and educational purposes.
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One of the key implications of seeing creativity as a social process is to recognize that people “create their world, at least in part, by anticipating how other people will respond, emotionally and cognitively, to what they do”
In interaction design, this can be easily connected to the modern prevalence of "preview modes" or testing "views" - it puts the designer in the shoes of the people who will be interacting with their designs.
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What this socially-distributed view of creativity does is to recognize “that a creator does not create in isolation but amidst other people (e.g. audience, collaborators, or other stakeholders).
In considering that designers design "amidst others", what role do the "others" play in the design outcomes?
Mentioned at the beginning of this annotation, one could contend that art history is the "truest" form history because it is representative of both the artist and the interactions of the artist and the society in which he exists in.
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emergence
It should be noted that emergence itself is both technical and conceptual.
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Overall, we provide a “problematization” [10] of creative work in HCI.
In offering problematization the authors challenge commonly accepted assumptions or values and explore how that value is made. In doing this, they can reveal political aspects of creative computing.
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DJ
Disc Jockey
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TED
Technology, Entertainment, Design
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US
United States
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DSK
Dvorak Simplified Keyboard
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CSI
creativity support index
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AI
artificial intelligence
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CST
creativity support tools
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HCI
Human Computer Interaction
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language of interaction
refers to language not as a vocabulary but as patterns of how users engage with digital interfaces and systems
The language of interaction: Rich interfaces, networks and design patterns
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nomenclature
system of naming things in a particular field
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Anna Ridler and David Pfau’s Bloemenveiling)
a 2019 interactive creative project where buyers participate in an auction of artificially-generated tulips on the blockchain, a decentralized system for online transactions; simply, the work explores how tech impacts the interplay of human want and economic behavior through artificial scarcity. Bloemenveiling
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tool-mediated expert activity
to perform creative tasks as mediated by tools in which you can develop expertise, e.g graphic design.
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www.lionsroar.com www.lionsroar.com
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It is the longing to make such a world that has been mostly forsaken as everything in our culture is subordinated to the maintenance of systems of exploitation and/or oppression, to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
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