Lecture 13

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Beyond Binary Choices: Integrating Individual and Social Creativity

Gerhard Fischer, Hal Eden, and Holger Dick — Fall Semester 2010

gerhard@colorado.edu; haleden@colorado.edu; holger.dick@gmail.com;  

October 13, 2010

source: Fischer, G., Giaccardi, E., Eden, H., Sugimoto, M., & Ye, Y. (2005) "Beyond Binary Choices: Integrating Individual and Social Creativity," International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS), 63(4-5), pp. 482-512. http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/ind-social-creativity-05.pdf

The Basic Message

• Individual versus Social Creativity ? Individual and Social Creativity

• why: the complexity and uniqueness of design problems transcends the unaided, individual human mind ? it requires social creativity

• example: a movie (director and 300 contributors)

Research in Creativity

• a timely and hot topic

• book: National-Research-Council (2003): “Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity”, National Academy Press, Washington, DC.
• September 2010: “Re/Search: Art, Science, and Information Technology”, A Joint Meeting of the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts

• workshop supported by the National Science Foundation, June 2005

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CST/

• conference series: “Creativity & Cognition”,

• June 2007: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007/
• October 2009: http://www.creativityandcognition09.org/

• new program “CreativeIT: Creativity and IT”; National Science Foundation (2007) ? http://swiki.cs.colorado.edu:3232/CreativeIT

One of the Grand Challenges for the Future of Computer Science:
Beyond Productivity: Innovation and Creativity

• challenge for the 21st century: “work smarter, not harder”

• explore collaborative efforts between information technologies (IT) and creative practices (CP; fine arts, movie making, architecture, urban planning, software design) ? artists and technologists should find common ground

• objective-1 (IT  ? CP): how can IT provide new tools and media for artists and designers that enable new types of work?

• objective-2 (CP ? IT): how can CP raise important challenges for IT (new tools, new representations)?

• objective-3 (IT + CP): how can a successful collaboration of IT and CP be established? ? check out the ATLAS Institute at CU
  http://www.colorado.edu/ATLAS/

Creativity: Four Essential Attributes

• originality means people having unique ideas  or applying existing ideas to new contexts

• expression — ideas or new applications are of little use if they are only internalized; they need to be expressed and externalized

• social evaluation — externalizations allow other people (with different backgrounds and perspectives) to understand, reflect upon, and improve them

• social appreciation within a community —rewards, credits, and acknowledgements by others that motivate further creative activities

Historical versus Psychological Creativity

• historical creativity = ideas and discoveries that are fundamentally novel with respect to the whole of human history

• psychological creativity = ideas and discoveries in everyday work practice that are novel with respect to an individual human mind or social community

• a capacity inherent to varying degrees in all people
• needed in most problem-solving situations
• knowledge workers and designers have to engage in creative activities to cope with the unforeseen complexities of real-world tasks

Creativity —The “Wrong” Image?

“The Thinker” by Auguste Rodin

Human Creativity = f{Medium}

• Neil Postman, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”:
  “you cannot use smoke signals to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content”

• claim: we cannot use most current computer systems to be creative

• challenge: design of socio-technical environments supporting creativity by allowing us

• to think previously unthinkable thoughts
• to do previously undoable actions, and
• to explore previously unfeasible questions

Individual Creativity

• creative individuals can make a huge difference — for example: movie directors, champions of sports teams, leading scientists and politicians, architects and urban planners, ……….

• foundations for individual creativity:

• grounded in the unique perspective that an individual brings to bear in a specific problem
• results from the life experience, culture, education, and background knowledge of an individual

• support mechanisms for individual creativity:

• breakdowns as a source for creativity (“critiquing”)
• reflection-in-action (“making argumentation serve design”)
• domain-oriented design environments (DODEs) empower skilled domain workers by bringing task to the front with the support of human problem-domain interaction
• make information relevant to the task at hand
• seeding, evolutionary growth and reseeding (SER) process model (honor emerging phenomena)

A DODE for Kitchen Design: Construction

A DODE for Kitchen Design: Argumentation

Creativity oriented Assessment / Evaluation Issues in DODEs

• do critics enhance or hinder creativity (e.g., Fosbury Flop)? — Stravinsky: “without constraints, there can be no creativity”

• differences in performance, quality, and creativeness as a function of critics, catalog, simulation component?

• trade-offs between critiquing (breakdowns occur) versus constraint (breakdowns are prevented)

• trade-offs between different intervention strategies (active versus passive)

• does “making information relevant to the task at hand” prevent serendipity?

• under which conditions will designers challenge or extend the knowledge represented in the system?

Individual Creativity has Limits

• in today’s society, the Leonardesque aspiration to have people who are competent in all of science fails because the individual human mind is limited (“symmetry of ignorance”)

• “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” — Mihaly Csikszentmihályi

• “Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds!” — Alexander Graham Bell

• “none of us is as smart as all of us” ? Bennis, W. & Biederman, P. W. (1997) Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

• “Linux was the first project to make a concious and successful effort to use the entire world as a talent pool” ? Raymond, E. S. & Young, B. (2001) The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, CA.

Social Creativity

• the Renaissance scholar (who knows “everything”) does not exist anymore

• the individual, unaided human mind is limited
• the great individual? the great group/community

• distinct domain of human knowledge exist ? of critical importance: mutual appreciation, efforts to understand each other, increase in socially shared cognition and practice

• exploit the “symmetry of ignorance” as an opportunity

• none of the stakeholders solving a complex problem can guarantee that their knowledge is superior or more complete compared to other people’s knowledge
• to overcome the “symmetry of ignorance” ? activate as much knowledge from as many stakeholders as possible with the goal of achieving mutual education and shared understanding

Individual versus / and Social Creativity

“The strength of the wolf is in the pack,
and the strength of the pack is in the wolf.”— Rudyard Kipling

• individual:

• human collaboration is not only needed but central to social creativity
• individuals participating in collaborative inquiry and creation need the individual reflective time depicted by Rodin's sculpture
• without such reflection it is difficult to think about contributions to social creativity

• social

• Rodin's sculpture "The Thinker" dominates our collective imagination as the purest form of human inquiry — the lone, stoic thinker
• the reality is that scientific and artistic forms emerge from joint thinking, passionate conversations, and shared struggles

The Fish-Scale Model for Social Creativity

• “collective comprehensiveness through overlapping patterns of unique narrowness” ? Campbell, D. T. (1969) "Ethnocentrism of Disciplines and the Fish-Scale Model of Omniscience."

Conceptual Framework

• 
  
  • distances in social creativity

• spatial
• temporal
• conceptual
• technological

• 
  
  • details: Fischer, G. (2005) "Distances and Diversity: Sources for Social Creativity," Proceedings of Creativity & Cognition, London, April, pp. 128-136

Distance “Spatial Dimension” — Voices from Far Away

• bringing spatially distributed people together: supports the shift that shared concerns rather than shared location becomes the prominent defining feature of a group of people interacting with each other

• allows more people to be included, thus exploiting local knowledge

• success model: open source communities

• transcending the barrier of spatial distribution is of particular importance in locally sparse populations

Distance “Temporal Dimension” — Voices from the Past

• design processes often take place over many years, with initial design followed by extended periods of evolution and redesign

• importance of

• design rationale
• redesign and reuse (“complex systems evolve faster if they can build on stable subsystems” )

• compare: Lecture on Sept 29 about SER Model

Distance “Conceptual Dimension” — Voices from Collaborators

• Communities of Practice (CoPs)

• Communities of Interest (CoIs)

• more in lecture on October 27, 2010

Distance “Technological Dimension”
—
What are good Creativity Support Tools?

• 
  
  • Searching & browsing large information repositories (e.g.: Google Search)

• 
  
  • Visualizing Data & Processes

• 
  
  • Thinking by Free Associations

• 
  
  • Exploring Solutions - What If Tools (Spreadsheets, Simulations)

Examples of Environments Supporting Creativity

• Craft Technology Group (Michael Eisenberg) http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~ctg/Craft_Tech.html

• Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory and Caretta — focused on social creativity in urban planning ? class meetings on October 18 and 20

• CodeBroker: Fostering Social Creativity by Facilitating Reuse in Open Source —Ye, Y., & Fischer, G. (2002) "Supporting Reuse by Delivering Task-Relevant and Personalized Information." In Proceedings of 2002 International Conference on Software Engineering (Icse'02), Orlando, FL, pp. 513-523.

• SketchUp, 3D Warehouse and Google Earth — exploiting the power of mass collaboration (and Web 2.0 technologies) ? Guest Lecture in class meetings on October 25

Craft Technology Group

The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC)

Boulder City Council and University of Colorado Regents

Integrating Individual and Social Creativity: Caretta

SketchUp + 3D Warehouse + Google Earth:
CU Boulder in 3D

Downtown Denver in 3D

Creativity and Productivity
—
Implications for Students in Computer Science

• creativity and outsourcing

• exploiting the long tail for creativity, discovery, and innovation ? ? details in lecture on November 3, 2010

• transdisciplinary education and collaboration ? details in lecture on December 1, 2010

Outsourcing ? Economic Implications

• US tax returns in India (tax returns: knowledge work, but rule-based)

• 
  
  • 2003: 25,000
  • 2004: 100,000
  • 2005: 400,000

• the changing world (in less than 50 years):

• 
  
  • sold in China
  • made in China
  • designed in China
  • dreamed up in China

• basic assumption: the more “creative work” will stay in the USA ? combine technical knowledge (e.g., how to write computer programs) with business, scientific knowledge, and take advantage of local contexts

• question: what are the educational implications of these changes? how do we educate students for finding a job in the world of tomorrow?

Democratizing Creativity — with Cultures of Participation and Meta-Design

Hippel, E. v. (2005) Democratizing Innovation, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

• creativity and innovation are being democratized — meaning: users of product and services are increasingly able to innovate for themselves

• integrate and complement manufacturer-creativity and user—creativity

• the needs of users for products are highly heterogeneous in many fields

• users may value the process of innovating and being creative because of the enjoyment and learning that it brings them ? in personally meaningful problems

• claim: users’ ability to innovate is improving radically and rapidly as a result of the steadily improving quality of computer software and hardware, improved access to easy-to-use tools and components for innovation, and access to a steadily richer innovation commons

Assessment of Social Creativity

• what will make people want to engage in social creativity?

• requires: culture change, new mindsets, new reward systems
• organizational rewards
• social capital

• self-application of this idea to L³D:

• value gained by the individual to contribute to the social is greater than the effort expended
• barriers with creating and evolving organizational memories:
• individuals must perceive a direct benefit
• the effort required to contribute must be minimal so it will not interfere with getting the real work done

• “collaborative systems will not work in a non-collaborative society”

• a student’s observation in one of our classes using technologies to enhance peer-to-peer learning, sharing of information, self-evaluation, etc.
• collaboration should not be considered as cheating

Conclusions

• the basic message

• the complexity and uniqueness of design problems transcends the unaided, individual human mind
• support individual and social creativity

• linkage of creativity to meta-design, cultures of participation, and human-centered computing:

• creative people should use their creativity to create socio-technical environments in which other people can be creative