Article published In:
Creativity, Cognition and Material CultureEdited by Lambros Malafouris, Chris Gosden and Karenleigh A. Overmann
[Pragmatics & Cognition 22:1] 2014
► pp. 5–26
Edited by Lambros Malafouris, Chris Gosden and Karenleigh A. Overmann
[Pragmatics & Cognition 22:1] 2014
► pp. 5–26
The importance of chance and interactivity in creativity
Individual creativity is standardly treated as an ‘internalist’ process occurring solely in the head. An alternative, more
interactionist view is presented here, where working with objects, media and other external things is seen as a fundamental
component of creative thought. The value of chance interaction and chance cueing — practices widely used in the creative arts — is
explored briefly in an account of the creative method of choreographer Wayne McGregor and then more narrowly in an experimental
study that compared performance on a Scrabble-like word discovery problem. Subjects were presented with seven letters and given
two minutes to call out three-to-seven-letter English words. There were three conditions: The tiles were fixed in place, subjects
were free to move the tiles manually or the tiles could be randomly shuffled. Results showed that random shuffling was best, with
manual movement second. Three reasons are provided: Shuffling is faster and cheaper than mentally thinking of candidates;
randomizing strings covers the search space better than a deterministic method based on past successes; and randomizing is
equivalent to adding diversity to a team, which is known empirically to lead to more creative solutions.
Keywords: interactivity, Scrabble, choreography, randomness, problem solving, Creativity, thinking
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