ABSTRACT
Where do ideas come from? What happens before an idea is born? Is an idea like the Baby Dear in George MacDonald’s Victorian poem, a fully formed god-given (Albert and Runco 1999) entity that can be found under any decent-sized gooseberry bush/cabbage/stork by a passing genius? Or is an idea the product of a process that happens within and between minds – both individual and collaborative? Popular belief in the ‘Aha!’ moment of solitary inspiration – what Sawyer (2012) calls one of the myths of creativity – is still strong, despite people’s own experience to the contrary. When I have asked people about how they get and develop their ideas, they immediately think about their own cognitive ‘Aha’ moments, and then go on to describe a collaborative, iterative process where they build ideas with other people. This has happened whether they are a dancer, a visual or sound artist, a commercial IT coder, sales executive, engineer, community artist, academic, film director, health service manager, hacker or research scientist. In my interviews with them, they describe how they build their ideas using artefacts and information from the world around them, for example, ‘I think [ideas] come from everybody, for me [. . .] somebody gives me an idea and I can build it, I can see if it works or not, I can filter it and so on’, and gleaned from other people, ‘I like building tool sets when [. . .] we are in the office and we are making field calls and I can observe other people working’. Sometimes they talk about doing this deliberately, and sometimes they describe how chance and serendipity play a major part in their creativity. The myth of the solitary genius has also been challenged academically. In creativity research Sawyer (2003) has studied group creative processes
by analysing what happens in improvisational theatre, and proposes that rather than being great leaps of intuition, ideas are built between people in a series of small incremental steps. Laseau (1975, 2001), as an architect and designer, describes how an idea moves between the designer’s mind, her hands, the paper and the minds of other people as she draws, growing iteratively as it does. Resnick (2007) observed kindergarten children developing their ideas in a spiral process, where the idea moves between an individual child to a collaboration with one or more other children, and back again. In interviewing, observing and surveying people from the wide range of professions described above, I have seen how ideas are shaped not just by person-to-person interaction, but also through interaction with the physical environment and its affordances. Gibson (1977) proposed that things in the physical environment afford us possibilities of action – a chair can be for sitting or standing on, or breaking a window or keeping a lion at bay, or burning as fuel: the possibilities are limited only by our imagination. In the field of cognitive studies, Hutchins’ theory of distributed cognition (1995) takes this even further and ‘extends the reach of what is considered cognitive beyond the individual to encompass interactions between people and with resources and materials in the environment’ (Hollan et al. 2000) and Clark (2011, 1997) in his study of cognition proposes the ‘extended’ as opposed to the ‘brainbound’ mind, where ‘[t]he human mind emerges at the productive interface of brain, body, and social and material world’ (Clark 2011: 218-219). Clark gives the example of Richard Feynman insisting that the notes he made on a piece of paper were not a record of his thinking, they actually were his thinking – the paper, the pen, his hand movements were all part of Feynman’s cognitive process. I am proposing a meta-model of the creative process that takes into account the way ideas grow and develop and deepen as they move between people and their environments, and I look at how this creativity is based in early childhood experiences. The meta-model states that:
Creativity happens when people iteratively engage with and disengage from, other people, information, ideas and the physical environment.
