Digital technologies allow for new creative processes and forms of creative expression, indeed, the general public is awash with ways to create, collaborate, and engage with each other across the globe twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. However, the nature of human creativity remains an enduring mystery; we still lack tools, models, and techniques to help us design for more engaging creative experiences.
Contemporary research is embarking on exploration of what we refer to as ‘Everyday Creativity’ - creativity beyond the confines of the lab, office, or gallery; creativity that embraces the everyday and helps us all realise our full creative potential. Critical to the success of this endeavour is an understanding of how groups of people engage in Everyday Creativity in processes that are known as ‘Collective Creativity’. The idea that creative acts can be collective is sometimes debated. The highly creative Pierre Boulez, for example, remarked strongly to one of us, “I do not believe in collective creativity!” However, it has been an active concern not only of this journal but also of the Creativity and Cognition conference series, from which these papers arose (Nagakoji et al. Citation1999, Nagakoji et al. Citation2002, Jacucci and Wagner Citation2007).
The 7th Creativity and Cognition conference (CC '09), sponsored by the Association of Computing Machinery, was held at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in October 2009. The conference series was started in 1993 and in 2009 mixed models of creativity, visual arts, music, and interdisciplinary research to explore the theme of Everyday Creativity. In this special issue we bring together a selection of research from the conference that specifically addresses how people create together in these situations - how they engage with each other in Collective Creativity. Ernest Edmonds (Director of the Creativity and Cognition studios) and Nick Bryan-Kinns (Chair of the Creativity and Cognition 2009 conference) selected these 4 papers from the 260 submissions to the conference based on the peer reviews of the work, presentation at the conference, and contribution to the understanding of Collective Creativity. The selected papers report on a range of studies of collaborative design.
Harrell looked at groups connecting with the use of avatars and similar constructs. In this case, the main concern is with methods that enable the avoidance of stigmatised norms by empowering users to create and critique in appropriate ways.
Le Dantec, on the other hand, looked at design meetings and their situated nature. The paper discusses the relationship between creativity in a social context and cultural cognition.
Shaw conducted a study of mediated engineering design practice and discusses the nature of the collective creative process and its unpredictable developments.
Svihla looked at students collaborating on engineering design, the nature of successful teams, and the influence design situation was framing.
We hope you enjoy these papers and gain new insights and ideas from them.
All of the papers in this special issue have gone through additional peer review prior to publishing and we would like to thank the reviewers, especially Linda Candy and Piotr Adamczyk for their support to help disseminate these papers further. We would also like to thank the Editor-in-Chief of CoDesign, Janet McDonnell, and Meloney Bartlett, Publisher of Science & Engineering Journals at Taylor & Francis, for giving us the opportunity to publish these papers in this special issue of the journal.
References
- Jacucci , G. and Wagner , I. Performative roles of materiality for collective creativity . Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity & Cognition, C&C '07 . June 13–15 , Washington, DC, USA. pp. 73 – 82 . New York : ACM .
- Nakakoji , K. , Yamamoto , Y. and Ohira , M. A framework that supports collective creativity in design using visual images . Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Creativity & Cognition, C&C '99 . October 11–13 , Loughborough, United Kingdom. pp. 166 – 173 . New York : ACM .
- Nakakoji , K. , Yamamoto , Y. and Aoki , A. Interaction design as a collective creative process . Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Creativity & Cognition, C&C '02 . October 13–16 , Loughborough, UK. pp. 103 – 110 . New York : ACM .