Précis ofThe creative mind: Myths and mechanisms

Abstract

What is creativity? One new idea may be creative, whereas another is merely new: What's the difference? And how is creativity possible? These questions about human creativity can be answered, at least in outline, using computational concepts. There are two broad types of creativity, improbabilist and impossibilist. Improbabilist creativity involves (positively valued) novel combinations of familiar ideas. A deeper type involves METCS: the mapping, exploration, and transformation of conceptual spaces. It is impossibilist, in that ideas may be generated which – with respect to the particular conceptual space concerned – could not have been generated before. (They are made possible by some transformation of the space.) The more clearly conceptual spaces can be defined, the better we can identify creative ideas. Defining conceptual spaces is done by musicologists, literary critics, and historians of art and science. Humanist studies, rich in intuitive subtleties, can be complemented by the comparative rigour of a computational approach. Computational modelling can help to define a space, and to show how it may be mapped, explored, and transformed. Impossibilist creativity can be thought of in “classical” Al terms, whereas connectionism illuminates improbabilist creativity. Most Al models of creativity can only explore spaces, not transform them, because they have no self-reflexive maps enabling them to change their own rules. A few, however, can do so. A scientific understanding of creativity does not destroy our wonder at it, nor does it make creative ideas predictable. Demystification does not imply dehumanization.

The studio as laboratory: Combining creative practice and digital technology research

“…In computing communities, the subject was rediscovered in the area of computational creativity (e.g. Boden, 1990;Partridge and Rowe, 1994) and more recently in Human Computer Interaction (Shneiderman, 2000;Candy and Hori, 2003). The gulf between the creative practitioners and the creativity researchers remains a large one but, in the field of computer support for creativity, this is being addressed by enabling practitioners to take an active role in the system development process.…”

Symmetry of ignorance, social creativity, and meta-design

“…This type of creativity is in most cases not historical; that is, the activity or the product is not necessarily novel or original to a community of practice or society as a whole, but psychological. It is personally novel and meaningful to the stakeholders who produced it [Boden, 1991]. Although analyzing outstanding creative people contributes toward establishing a framework for creativity [Gardner, 1993], understanding creativity in the context of everyday activities is equally important for letting people become more productive and create better work products.…”

An integrated perspective on insight.

“…and art with what has been called the "bed-bus-bath" phenomenon (Boden, 1990). This means that the phenomenon of insight typically occurs under very relaxed conditions.…”