Is Creativity One Thing or Many?---a Model of 60 Models of Creativity (original) (raw)
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SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013
This paper challenges 11 fundamentals in current models of creating, and current systems for "supporting" creating. It also questions the importance and amount of creativity needed and produced in industry. A model of 60 models of creativity is presented along with mention of 4 pilot studies underway with it. The kind of challenges to usual research on computer supports of creativity made here are illustrated by the following points. 1) There is little evidence that creativity is one process and solid evidence that it is myriad related processes 2) Systems, therefore, that "support" one of those myriad models well, will possibly, if there are negative trade-off relations among models, shut down and eliminate more creativity in collateral models than they "support" in their one intended model 3) In several areas of mental performance what makes generation and access easy hinders recall and application-by making "creating" faster or easier involving less of the brain less strenuously, we may be reducing later processing, imagining, elaboration, and recall, hence, reducing later creativity achieved. 4) Vendors push technologies on everyone and today push more connectedness. At first more connections join isolated entities, fostering idea blends and creation, however, familiarity grows rapidly till people tire of pawing through reams of the same old same old = involvement plummets. Pulsed systems, with alternating rhythms of engagement/detachment, connection/isolation, reason/emotion may outperform mere "more connectedness" systems for attaining many kinds of creativity. These and related fundamental omissions in current norms and cultures in computational support for creativity are examined and pilot study results of countering them with particular tools in major corporation creativity efforts are described. Among such tools one stands out, a model of 60 models of creativity, presented .
Is Creativity One Thing? 60 Models of Creativity from 150 Eminent Creators
This is the world's single most comprehensive and detailed presentation of diverse creativity models, as of this writing. Here is a short article with, in an appendix, diagrams of all the variables in each of the 60 models. This is the summary I have students apply in their research, survey, experiment, and interview work. It is also the core document I use in Invent Events, when assigning particular creativity procedures to specific workshop teams.
A Creativity Checklist: 1500 Variables that Affect Creativity from 20 Models of Creativity
A model of 60 models of creativity was develop in prior research. 20 of those 60 models were selected for use in a checklist of 1500 variables said by those models to affect creativity. This checklist is a tool for challenging the dominant Harvard idea that creativity is one thing and that therefore how environments support "it" makes sense. This paper, and the checklist it presents, demonstrate hundreds of creativity-causing conditions untouched in such simplistic, commercial models of creativity as if it were one thing, from money-oriented universities like Harvard.
A Model of 42 Models of Creativity
The most comprehensive introduction to nearly all of creativity research in print at this time--42 models presented briefly and 8 models presented in detail, plus a 40 page questionnaire on the key variables of all the models. A paper on a follow up model of 60 models of creativity done after this one, is available for free downloading at scribd.com via a link provided here.
Research Questions: 1. How do research and achievement of creativity improve when a tool of much greater comprehensiveness, detail, and level of organization is applied to common assessment, evaluation, and specifi cation tasks?--the secondary question in this paper. 2. How do you create a checklist vastly more detailed, comprehensive, and ordered than any prior such tools?--the primary question in this paper. 3. What models of creativity if put into a large checklist format offer enough comprehensibility, diversity, and practicality to motivate people to use, study, and fully apply the checklist tool? This article presents the key variables of each of 20 well-ordered models of creativity, in a checklist format. 1500 variables, organized in checklist format, with 0 to 10 point scales and fi ll in spaces for each variable, are included. Each of the 20 models is explained as well as some important initial uses of the checklist, by the author and other organizations. The signifi cance, for understanding creativity and impacting it practically, of having more detailed, comprehensive, well-ordered, and articulated models of it is examined in the context of an overall program of structural cognition--applying ordinary cognitive operators not to sets of 3 to 6 ideas at a time but to ordered patterns of 50 to 100 ideas at a time. Research, educative, and work improvement uses of the checklist are described. Method: A model of 60 models of creativity was used to select 20 models, from diverse original model categories, to balance practicality, diversity, and comprehensibility.
The present work proposes an integrative model of creativity that includes personality traits and cognitive processes. This model hypothesizes that three high-order personality factors predict two main process factors, which in turn predict intensity and achievement of creative activities. The personality factors are: Plasticity (high openness, extraversion, energy, and inspiration), Divergence (low agreeableness and conscientiousness, high nonconformity and impulsivity), and Convergence (high ambition, precision, persistence, and critical sense). The process factors are Generation (idea production and originality) and Selection (idea evaluation and formalization). We hypothesized and found that: (a) Plasticity and Divergence predict positively Generation, (b) Convergence predicts positively Selection, (c) Generation, Selection, and their interaction predict positively both intensity and achievement of everyday creative activities.
Creativity 0: A Beginner's Intro to Nearly All of Creativity Theory & Practice
This article presents a model of 42 models of creativity from the research literature. Weaknesses in the last five years of research journal publishings on creativity are then specified and understood with reference to this model of models. A new model of creativity--a garbage can type model--called the "Four Cycle Model"--that corrects certain, but not all, weaknesses in that research literature including well-known models by Amabile, Simonton, Sternberg, Martindale, Gruber, Runco, and others is presented. Thirteen types of variables are included in this new model: long-term background variable types (culture, socio-economics, self type), creation variable types (mental fluency and association breadth, subcreations, creativity processes, creation dynamics, question finding dynamics, creative output), audience variable types (audience hot topics), short term background variable types (career, environment, workstyle). Of these thirteen, subcreations plays the linchpin role, in various ways. Four feedbacks are explicitly modeled: one, creative outputs change long term background variables of the creator which in turn change creative outputs; two, creative outputs change short term variables of the society which in turn change creative outputs; three, creative intermediate outputs change questions pursued by the creator which determine creation process steps done which specify creation functions applied which change creative outputs; and four, mental flexibility and breadth of association achieved change subcreations invented, which, in turn, change mental flexibility and association breadth possible. The Four Cycles Model, that this paper presents, includes seven other models of creativity within it, explained in this article: the subcreations model, insight model, creation dynamics model, question finding dynamics model, darwinian systems model, culture mix model, and population automaton model. 303 variables affecting creativity are encompassed in these models. The Four Cycle Model also includes models of other long-term and short-term background aspects that influence creativity (culture, self image, workstyle, career dynamics, work environment, and social processes). A 44 page creativity questionnaire produced from this model is attached as an appendix. A stratified sample of 63 creator types in Japanese society is presented as the target population the questionnaire is being administered to now and over the next few years. Hypotheses and research questions derived from the 4 cycle model are summarized at the end of the article.
128 Steps Common to How Many Creators Create and Become Creative Combining Recommendations and Recollections of Becoming Creative and Being Creative by Creators in 63 Fields Research Question 1 CAPTURE PATTERN IN CREATOR RECOMMENDATIONS: What model of creating comes from all the distinct recommendations creators make about how to create? Research Question 2 EXPAND CREATION MODEL GRANULARITY: What are 85+ steps to becoming a creator and creating organized fractally into levels of scope and detai? Research Question 3 CAN ORDINARY PEOPLE CREATE OR ONLY CREATORS: What creates creators? Nearly all experts now measuring how various aspects of organizations and their systems and environments support being creative use models of the process of becoming and being creative of extreme generality, typically having 8 to 20 steps, as modern statistical methods of research are not comfortably applied to more detailed, complex, and articulated models. Unfortunately, all creators, not a few, become creative and are creative via dozens of steps, carefully sequenced, not 8 to 20 steps. So experts now measuring how organization systems support becoming creative simply omit whether there are supports or hindrances for the vast majority of steps of actual creators. In not a few cases, this leads to entirely useless or erroneous analysis. This paper reports a model of 128 steps of becoming and being creative, developed from reports by creators in 63 different fields, that is roughly one order of magnitude more detailed and specific than other published models. It thereby invites examination of how environments support 100 steps omitted from all other published models of becoming or being creative. Method 1 FIND COMMON ORDERING OF STEPS IN CREATION PROCESSES OF DIFFERENT CREATORS: Ask 150 creators in 63 diverse fields what steps they took to become creators and to create particular works and find common steps and common ordering among them. One would suppose that each creator has a different, unique, way of becoming creative in his or her field, especially when fields as different as classic music performing and bioinformatics are compared. One could, however, suppose oppositely, that all creators, whatever their fields, share an approximate ordering of steps even where they do not include exactly the same steps as other creators used. In other words, there might be some sort of "consensus", not in opinions of creators, but latent in the actual sequences of steps they used to become or be creative. To what extent are "being creative" and "becoming creative" domain dependent in steps versus domain general? This paper attempts a partial answer to that question. Literature in expert systems (Chi et al, 1988; Ericcson and Simon, 1980), suggesting two parts to expertise in general, a domain-specific part of 40% or more of "methods" of work and a domain-general part of 60% or less, clearly implies, to the extent that creating is a sort of expertise (invention, imagination, design), that it has domain-independent content. Two things are involved--do different creators mention the same steps, do they mention those steps in the same ordering or in reverse ordering. Method 2 PROTOCOL ANALYSIS AND CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS METHODS: Use artificial intelligence and total quality methods to find processes within and outside minds of becoming a creator and creating works. Method 3 FRACTAL CONCEPT MODEL OF CREATION STEPS: Put steps of becoming a creator and of creating into hierarchy of levels, with similar ordering of items across all hierarchy levels, and level revealing point names on each level. A stratified sample of 150 creative Americans in 63 widely different fields of endeavor were interviewed, using techniques modified from "protocol analysis" techniques of artificial intelligence expert systems building and total quality processware theories of work modeling, to obtain models, explicit or implicit in practices, of how they became creative and how they now create. The interview used had twelve specially designed "doorways" intended to be diverse approaches to getting beyond unthinking, mystifying, automatic, and stereotyped ideas about "creation" to actual key factors in models the creators themselves used. Content analysis of transcripts produced approximately 4500 two-step sequences to becoming and being creative. Sequences were grouped where independent judges concluded that terminology was masking functional unity, and resulting sequence group names were overlapped to put them into an overall order--where 20 or more of the 150 respondents agreed on the ordering of a pair of 2-steps, it was included in the final model. Branch factors and item names in the final model were adjusted to make a fractal model of branch factor 4 for becoming creative and another such fractal model of branch factor 4 for being creative. Where similar models in the research literature on creativity were found, terminology in the model was modified to make such similarities evident. A book was composed summarizing all 128 steps, with Japanese and US examples of each step, specification of blocks on those cultures to doing each step, and a step-by-step method fusing practices from surveyed respondents. Result 8 STEPS TO CREATING A CREATOR WHO CREATES: Make your self into a creator by---Making interior emotive room, making exterior time/space room, embracing paradox during wide-ranging mental travel; That creator creates by---creating a creation machine of specially invented tools for creating, thinking, conquering limitations, and managing emergence purning noise from signal/discovery. This paper presents this model as one more articulated and specific than usual models, allowing much more precise specification of what it is that organizations, systems, and environments support and hinder in being and becoming creative than less articulated models in prior published research. Furthermore, this paper's model represents something like a consensus among 63 different fields of what steps in what order creators execute.