The Big Bang of Originality and Effectiveness: A Dynamic Creativity Framework and Its Application to Scientific Missions

Abstract

This article introduces a theoretical framework to conceptualize the dynamics of the phenomenon of creativity, which is then applied to the specific case of scientific missions for the exploration of the universe. Static definitions of creativity are insufficient for this purpose, as they fail to describe states of creative inconclusiveness as well as the time and culture-dependent estimation of the value of the outcomes of a creative process; therefore, a dynamic definition of creativity is introduced, justified, and adopted to build a dynamic creativity framework. Within this framework, creativity episodes are shown to be mutually interconnected through several mechanisms (past and future concatenation, estimation, and exaptation), to form a dynamic universal creativity process (DUCP), the beginning of which can be traced back to the Big Bang of our universe. The DUCP entails several layers of complexity (material, biological, sociocultural, and artificial), showing that creativity is not only a psychological construct for humans but rather a unifying cosmological principle. Context embeddedness is discussed in-depth, introducing a taxonomy based on the concepts of tightness and looseness as applied to conceptual space and time. This theoretical framework is, then, applied to the discussion of the design, realization, and operations of scientific missions for the exploration of the universe, taking as a reference the terminology adopted by the European Space Agency.

Intelligence and Creativity: Mapping Constructs on the Space-Time Continuum

“…The definition of creativity DC introduced in this article, in agreement with ( Corazza and Lubart 2020 ), contains the dynamic definition of creativity and adds explicitly that creativity is a context-embedded phenomenon, to place the emphasis on the fact that our understanding of the construct is tightly related to the cultural and social environment, and to ensure that the level of the definition DC is identical to that of definition DI. The importance of this addition is therefore apparent when we consider the two definitions together, as discussed in the following section.…”

“…An “episode” is here defined as the conventional container for a specified human activity in a determined domain of knowledge, characterized by a thinking process and behavior that will be assessed in terms of its intelligence and/or creativity. As discussed in ( Corazza 2019 , 2020 ; Corazza and Lubart 2020 ), any episode is dynamically concatenated with past and future episodes, and as such the overall cultural evolution transcends the single individual to form a dynamic universal creative process.…”

“…In line with ( Corazza and Lubart 2020 ), we consider that there are two fundamental sociocultural dimensions that characterize any context embedding human episodes, respectively identified as the conceptual space S and the available time span T.…”

Searching for creativity in the Portuguese preschool and basic education curricula

“…Departing from these contributions, and assuming an openly psychological, developmental and ecological viewpoint, we define creativity as an attribute of the complexity of selforganizing structures that develops, dynamically and inter-subjectively, within a specific time and context (Valquaresma, 2020). Our approach is in line with recent systemic and complex perspectives that define it as a continuous, dynamic, and inter-subjective process of coconstructing the world, capable of leveraging human psychological development (Corazza & Lubart, 2020;Glăveanu, 2020;Karwowski & Beghetto, 2019). Thus, it can be envisioned as a psychological construct, whose development depends on the ability to continuously harmonize the individual and contextual influences that impact the lifespan developmental process of meaning and world-making (Goodman, 1978).…”

How constraints impact creativity: An interaction paradigm.

“…We believe this proposed curvilinear relationship, which appears to be a biproduct of viewing constraints as a main effect, fails to capture the multifaceted interactions taking place when different types of constraints are implemented for different people, tasks, and contexts. Instead, we propose a more complex relationship, in alignment with the idea of a “sweet spot,” which has been described as dynamic and context-dependent (Biskjaer et al, 2020), just as creativity (Corazza & Lubart, 2020; Tromp & Sternberg, 2022).…”