Understanding Design as a Social Creative Process

What I read

In this paper, the authors consider creativity research, first broadly, and then in terms of groups working together. They propose that groups should be more creative while working synchronously, but are more creative while working alone and then pooling their ideas, and identify three reasons why this may be true.

The authors begin by defining participatory design, a process where users are involved in the design stage of software. This is a social process that “epitomizes the collaborative nature of design, bringing together stakeholders from diverse backgrounds.” They describe that collaboration is a “magic art” because creativity isn’t typically defined. It’s important to define it because “the larger the number of ideas that are produced, the greater the probability of achieving an effective solution… the more creative we are in design, the greater the probability of designing useful and usable software applications and computer systems.”

The authors then break creativity into three areas—process, person, and product (or output)—and describe how these have been historically discussed in literature. The creative process is discussed in terms of theories of creative cognition, where there is a map, or set of conceptual spaces, or matrices. A creative person has historically been defined by various inventories or personality tests. A creative product is judged on its novelty and appropriateness. Novelty can be new to an individual or to a group, and the authors focus on P-Novel (new psychologically, to a person, rather than H-Noel, historically new.) The authors explain that “When we are creative we generally start with a problem, whether it is producing apainting or identifying a solution to a design problem.”

Appropriateness has been identified as being culturally related. Some have argued that “we could develop some way of ‘counting [creative ideas] in order to measure the creativity of an individual or group,” while others have argued that some type of subjective analysis is necessary to judge a degree of creativity.

Next, the authors provide a bulk of their discussion, which is focused on creative process models. Historically, models have included various combinations of stages like Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification, Idea Generation, Fact-finding, Task motivation, problem and task presentation Response generation, Validation, Collection, Relation, and Donation. Verification, for example, “involves making sure that one’s creative insight or novel idea is in fact an appropriate solution to one’s problem.”

The authors then summarize the various models into their own unified definition of creativity: “Creativity is the generation of ideas, which are acombination of two or more matrices of thought, which are considered unusual or new to the mind in which the ideas arose and are appropriate to the characteristics of a desired solution defined during the problem definition and preparation stage of the creative process.”

They then question the social nature of creativity. Osborn is cited as stated that a person can generate twice the number of ideas when working in a group, then when working alone. Taylor found the opposite, and a number of other studies have confirmed this: people working independently generate more ideas. The authors believe that, theoretically, social creativity can support the generation of more ideas. This is because they have shared resources of thought matrices, which can be combined. They offer three reasons why this may not be true in previous studies.

There may be “production blocking,” where the operations of group work (such as one person speaking at a time) limit creativity. Another may be “evaluation apprehension,” which are social pressures that limit confidence. The third is “free riding,” where some people in a group may be able to avoid participation without being noticed.

The authors conclude by stating that “theoretically social creativity should be more productive than individual creativity, and so design teams should be more creative than individual designers working alone,” but experimental evidence says this is incorrect. Their current work is trying to understand why the studies are wrong.

What I learned and what I think

My only real learnings from this paper were a) that some researchers have recognized that creativity doesn’t need to be “new” in some grandiose sense; Boden has separated creative ideas from being new to a single person, as compared to new to the world, and b) appropriateness is part of some researcher’s definitions of creativity (it’s unclear whom, but I think one of the citations to Amabile is likely the source.)

The rest of this paper continues to reinforce my challenges with how creativity is framed in academic literature. The whole argument, if there is one, is that quantity of ideas is directly related to the presence, or level, of creativity, and that quantity of ideas matters at all. The reference to Taylor, that “the larger the number of ideas produced, thegreater the probability of achieving an effective solution,” is the flaw in all of this body of research, stated nicely. Creativity is not a game of probabilities that can be gamed. It just fundamentally isn’t a phenomenon that works that way. An idea gets more refined over time, sure; but “over time” has nothing to do with quantity.

Equally problematic is, again, creativity is equated to problem solving. It just isn’t. The art comment is wonderful; quoted again, “When we are creative we generally start with a problem, whether it is producing a painting or identifying a solution to a design problem.” The reddit phenomenon of “tell me you aren’t a [] without telling me you aren’t a []” – these people have never painted. Or done anything even similar. Unless they mean painting a wall, which I’m pretty sure they don’t.

I’m confused by the structure of the paper. It seems like participatory design got jammed in at the beginning, but played no role throughout the rest of the content. I think they meant to say that participatory design equals more people involved in generating ideas, which then means more ideas, which then means more creativity. But that’s not participatory design at all. Liz’s perspective has, as I understand it, been that when you include the people who have to live with the thing you made, in the process of making it, the thing sucks less (my words, of course.) It's a process of subservience, or at least empathy building and perspective shifting. It has little to do with sitting around riffing on ideas.

They describe at the beginning that creativity isn't usually defined, and then cite many, many definitions of creativity.

I also really struggle with what I think is some bizarre logic flaw that, as these are smart and accomplished researchers, I wouldn’t have expected:

They indicate that research shows that people who work independently come up with more ideas than those in a group together. They say that, theoretically, this shouldn’t be true, because people can share their different perspectives in a group setting. They then say they are going to try to research why their theory isn’t working, so they can make it work. If this is trying to be a thoughtful and well-reasoned investigation, wouldn’t we conclude that our theory is wrong and the 50 studies they mention are right? I think the world is flat. 50 studies tell me it’s round. I really want it to be flat. So I’ll keep researching how I can make it flat. It’s so strange.

And again I’m perplexed about how this got published in a leading, peer-reviewed conference (Creativity and Cognition), which I’ve always thought had quality work. And it’s cited by 3700 people!

I’m going to track down some of Amabile’s work, which has come up in a number of papers I’ve been reading. Maybe she has a less reductive perspective on creativity.