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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 166! Defining Six Creative Concepts...
Good Morning experimenters at the emerging edge of languages,
Here in the heart of eastern seaboard megalopolis, it finally got cold—sweaters came out and pants began to be a necessity. In all, a very exciting and welcome sensation.
This week our research colleagues (Steven Greenstein, Bridget Looney, Karmen Yu, and Emily Olsen) presented our collaborative work on developing early childhood creative practices at the Psychology of Mathematics Education in Cleveland. What is most interesting to us in this work is that we could develop an enactive approach to assisting children as young as five years old in developing the means to effectively engage with both qualitative and quantitative forms of change. If interested in this work, just drop us an email and we would be happy to share.
This week we are turning to words and our intermittent newsletter series on Definitions. Experimenting with the new—the as yet nonexistent—is to push language beyond the dictionary. Novel concept creation is an inherent part of any experimental practice involving the new.
We try to maintain and develop our website as a comprehensive resource for all things creativity and innovation. A key aspect of that is our glossary—a never-finished or finishable work, always in progress. This week we are turning to six concepts that have sat in our glossary poorly defined and somewhat neglected.
It is important to note that these terms—these definitions are not attempts to correct language or get it right once and for all—but rather our glossary is the ongoing shaping of tools for a living creative practice. Each concept is approached from the perspective of this practice.
We encourage you to develop a glossary – it is a powerful tool for creative experimentation. And please share this with us – we are always very much interested in diverse experimental approaches to concepts and propositions.
As a basic quality of reality, everything is in motion. Nothing is static. This dynamism is one that always also involves novelty. Things are in motion and change. The new and the different are always coming into being. Things are always in the making—always being created. The dynamics of creativity—of the ongoing making of reality—are everywhere and everywhere in becoming. We often recognize things as unchanging and no longer in the making, but this is a type of illusion. And it is a perspective that fundamentally alienates us from creation and creativity. Creation and creativity are not discreet practices that have clear beginnings and ends. Things are not created, and then they just exist. No, rather—all things are “in the making.”
Creativity does not begin with the human or in ideas—it is a basic quality of our dynamic reality. Our human creativity begins in sensing the ongoing dynamics of reality in the making. “Nature is never complete. It is always passing beyond itself. This is the creative advance of nature” (A. N. Whitehead).
That reality is dynamic does not mean that everything simply moves and changes in the same manner. To speak of dynamism is to recognize differing speeds and slownesses. And it is to recognize that what is in motion are processes. Everything is process—fields and processes. What we take as fixed things—my body and this keyboard—are processes—processes in and on processes.
Stability is the temporary dynamic state of one phase of an adaptive system that ultimately has multiple stable states. Feedback loops will creatively tip the system into another state. The set of these linked states or phases produces a type of meta-stable condition. And these larger meta-stable states are themselves products of histories and will also transform.
Creativity is creation in the never-ending dynamics of every moment of reality—nothing is given—just there—everything is in the ongoing process of making.
The contemporary western definition of Creativity is a psychological definition. Which is to say that it is both (1) exclusively human-centered and (2) understood as an internal (psychological) state. This approach to creativity that coalesced in the mid-twentieth century in the US is very much a product of its immediate history—the Cold War. It can also be traced back to the Classical Greeks and their development of an ideational model of creation as one that involves the gaining access to and copying of ideal forms. We have written extensively about this and term this “the god model.”
This model of anthropocentric creativity puts undue emphasis on the brain and immaterial ideas. Which is a legacy that can be seen in the still current emphasis on “divergent thinking” and “abductive reasoning” as being paramount to creativity.
The problems with this approach are threefold:
(1) All reality is creative. Humans are not uniquely creative. We live in a world of ongoing spontaneous creativity, and our intentional creative practices surf these ongoing processes. In this regard, the development of the complexity sciences has played a significant and transformative role:
“As a result we now have a way of regarding nature as fundamentally creative. Nature allows for, indeed generates, the emergence of novelty, as the co-evolution of systems and environments continually opens new futures in the adjacent possible…” (The Blind Spot).
(2) Thinking—ideation is not something that happens “in” the head. Thinking is very much a “worldly” and engaged practice of making and doing. It is an embodied, interactive, social, embedded, and extended activity. Looking for thinking (never mind creativity) in the head is a category mistake. Here, the work of the Enactive approach to cognition has been transformative in correcting the long-standing computational brain-based approach to thinking.
(3) Ideation in all of its forms is inherently conservative. To ideate, imagine, and speculate fundamentally draws upon the known. The radically new—that which has never existed—by definition exceeds the known and the knowable. These creative processes can only be joined via engaged experimentalism.
We need to reorient our habits and practices away from anthropocentric individualism and immaterial, disengaged ideation. The myths of individualism and the lone genius are just that. Creativity was never the exclusive purview of humans. We, and our creative practices, have always been entangled with the ongoing creative practices of all reality. This is where a new approach to human creativity needs to begin.
A fundamental task in the creative process is one that paradoxically feels very "uncreative." To engage with and move towards the new, one needs to first understand what is not new—we need to understand the given. The famous experimental chef Ferran Adria defined creativity beautifully and succinctly: "creativity,” he said, “is not copying.”
But to not copy, one first needs to know what exists and to know it across many levels. This is one of the tasks of Disclosure. To differ, to innovate—to not copy—we need to ask: What are the underlying logics of the situation we find ourselves in?
We have to “know” to refuse the known. But what is it that we need to know to block to move us toward doing-thinking differently? Is it never enough to know and block the explicit features, the primary use of something, or its general form. Everything explicit relies on a vast set of unspoken, tacit assumptions and structures—an apparatus. So, to return to the question of “how might it be to think or act differently”? We need to go beyond what can be explicitly stated or known to enactively disclose and block a way of being alive. In short, disclosure needs to uncover the implicit and the tacit. We need to go beyond disclosing and blocking the obvious and what can be put into clear concepts.
Here we can follow the ontological turn in anthropology: what we are disclosing and potentially blocking is a “world” for the sake of exploring the potentiality that “other worlds are possible.”
And in disclosing a world, we need to focus our disclosure equally on tools, practices, concepts, and environments. We need to start with understanding how things make us—and this will be something that cannot be put fully into words—what we disclose and block as part of a creative practice will need to be things, environments, practices, and concepts.
But the task of disclosure in creative practices does not end with disclosing existent underlying logics. Disclosure importantly also involves a quite distinct task: disclosing unintended oddnesses in existent things that might offer a place to begin to experiment towards the qualitatively new. This form of disclosure—the disclosing of the novel and unintended—is a very different and very engaged experimental task. It is not something that can be done via ideation or conceptual analysis. It requires active forms of disruptive making; what else can it do? What are unintended affordances that might offer a starting point for Deviation?
Disclosure is, in all of its logics, a highly engaged and experimental activity. To understand is to create, and equally to “discover” the unintended is to create.
Too often creativity is fully associated with one or another state of being: the flow state, intuition, in the moment, for example. This profound reification and radical narrowing of creativity misses how it involves a complete ecology of practices, tasks, tools, and environments. And unfortunately, in all of the emphasis on flow—the tasks of Disclosure can seem the most foreign to creative practices—when they are in fact so critical.
Change is everywhere. Everything flows. But this does not mean that there is no stability or constancy in our reality. In our everyday lives, we see things staying the same. Your dining room table will still be there, looking pretty much the same when you wake up tomorrow.
So what does this mean for the idea that “change is everywhere," that “everything flows,” and that everything is processes all the way up and all the way down?
Yes, at every moment things are in the making—being created—it is just that these processes of change are ones of near repetition. These are incremental processes of change. Sameness is an astonishing creative achievement.
But not everything is in continuity; it is not the case that all change is quantitative. To assume this is a fundamental mistake. Change and creativity are not reducible to the “more or the less." In radical contrast to qualitative change stands qualitative change. This is a change in kind. The vernacular saying “you cannot compare apples and oranges” gets at this distinction.
Qualitative Change involves discontinuity and rupture. What once applied can no longer be applied. History and culture are full of qualitative changes misunderstood and miscategorized as just extreme variations of quantitative change. Everywhere continuity hides qualitative difference. And everywhere change and the creative processes involved in change are reduced to continuity, incrementalism, and the quantitative.
To properly and fully engage with creative practices, we need to carefully categorize change in its two forms: change-in-degree and change-in-kind:
These two forms of change are radically distinct, and the major problem in the world of human creative practices is that this is neither well recognized nor acted upon. Most methods and approaches to creativity and innovation simply focus on change-in-degree without even recognizing that there is another form of change. As such, we have many well-developed techniques for developmental change (Design Thinking, Brain Storming, Ideation, etc.)—but very few actual approaches to disruptive forms of change and innovation. This form of change is poorly understood in general and historically has not been the focus of innovation practices.
This can be taken further; most of our practices, environments, and sensibilities are entangled with change-in-degree (see above diagram). To effectively engage with change-in-kind processes and disruptive creativity, it is not enough to shift techniques; we need to develop new ecologies of distinct practices, environments, and sensibilities.
Disruptive change in being qualitatively new and different has significant unique challenges to creative practices. The primary challenge is that we simply cannot ideate or think of the radically new. These forms of novelty are ones that do not exist, nor do they reference what exists. The techniques needed involve forms of experimental making in advance of knowing. To engage with novel forms of change-in-kind is to work in the dark where there is nothing to be known until it emerges. Such techniques and logics stand in sharp distinction from the more familiar forms associated with developmental forms of creativity and change. Where developmental creativity can focus on an incremental outcome, disruptive creativity is always, by definition, a practice of novel worldmaking.
Everything is designed, which is to say everything comes into being via a process, stays in existence via other processes, and transforms into other things via other processes. Most of these forms of design emerge spontaneously – autopoetically. Most of reality is designed—but without a designer. This is true both in non-human contexts and human contexts.
Based upon an understanding that change comes in two forms: change-in-degree and change-in-kind, we can also loosely categorize design in a similar manner: Developmental Design and Disruptive Design. Developmental Design encompasses all of the processes involved in incremental, quantitative forms of change. While Disruptive Design encompasses qualitative forms of change making.
As a category, Developmental Design is what by and large almost all design processes are engaged in. Design Thinking, user-centered design, brainstorming, etc.—these are all processes best suited to incremental forms of change-making.
It is important to name these approaches as Developmental Design to make it clear that these approaches do not encompass all of design or all of creativity.
Approaches to creativity cannot limit themselves to Developmental Design practices, for in doing so they limit themselves to only engaging in changes-in-degree while never properly engaging with change-in-kind—the radically different and new. For this, we need the diverse practices of Disruptive Design.
Design Thinking is a highly popular human-centered design strategy that is a form of Developmental Design. Currently, it is perhaps the most popular form of Developmental Design.
As a methodology, Design Thinking’s focus is on empathizing with users and asking about their problems and needs and then developing solutions to these problems. It has been systematized into a four step method of: Empathize, Ideate, Prototype, Make.
It is important to understand Design Thinking as a response to historical design practices that began at a radical remove from actual users and actual needs – rather focusing on the ideas of designers. This is the classical method of Ideate, Plan, Make. By beginning with actual users, Design Thinking develops an effective way of improving existing designs to meet the existing needs of users.
A second important development that Design Thinking takes advantage of is the emergence and formalization of processes of prototyping. Where more classical methods of design refined ideas into products fully before allowing users to engage with them, the prototyping process does the opposite. Prototyping allows products to co-emerge and co-evolve via use.
All this said, Design Thinking as a method for creativity has significant limitations. While empathizing is important, Design Thinking is not an effective method to develop disruptive or qualitatively novel innovations. Because it begins from the logic of solving existing problems, it is inherently only involved in incremental forms of change and cannot assist in any form of Disruptive Design.
But the limits of Design Thinking go beyond its inability to engage with qualitative forms of creative processes. By being an “ideate first” process it cannot get beyond the conservative logic of ideation.
While there are benefits and reasonable use cases for variations of Design Thinking – on the whole there are better approaches to developmental creativity and design that avoid the limitations of ideation-driven innovation and work far more effectively with processes of co-emergence.
Well, the sun is up and the moon has set. The hum of traffic is pulling us out into other worlds and processes. We hope that you have a week of engaged experiments with discontinuities that make a qualitative difference.
Till next week,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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