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Experimenting, Experiencing Reflecting: Collective Creativity in the Library

Amos Blanton

Draft 6 April 2023

## Introduction

Human beings create together regardless of where they are located in space and time. Though we live in an age of unprecedented innovation across all disciplines, there is no breakthrough that does not depend upon the work of others. History and media connect those working today with those who worked in the past. For those whose lifetimes and interests overlap, we have numerous means of placing them in the same physical space, from academic departments to art festivals.

It is easy enough to trace the evolution of ideas across time and individuals at very large scales of space and time. That Aristotle had an effect on Newton, who in turn laid the groundwork for Bohr and Einstein would be hard to dispute.  But as we zoom in to finer scales of time and space, the connections become more subtle, harder to see. Watson and Crick have been credited with the "discovery" of DNA. But it's doubtful this would have been possible without the work of Rosalind Franklin and the community of scientists who were also working on the problem from different angles (Maddox, 2003).  As we look critically at colonial narratives about innovation and creativity, we begin to see that the cracks running through their foundations may extend all the way down to the idea of the individual genius itself (Fischer & Vassen, 2011, Weisberg 1993 and Arendt 2013 in Sosa, 2019). 

If great ideas don't spring from individual geniuses acting in isolation, where do they come from? And how then do we create the conditions conducive to such breakthroughs? Given the growing severity of the climate crisis and the apparent lack of individual geniuses capable of solving it, we could use a better understanding of how to go about creating the conditions for good ideas to arise. One alternative model has genius as an emergent property of collectives. 

An 'emergent property' is an idea from the science of complexity used to describe complex phenomena whose existence is dependent on constituent elements, but which is greater than the sum of its parts. Termite mounds, traffic jams, and the stock market are all examples of emergent phenomena: each display qualities that cannot be attributed to a single car, or termite, or stock.  Their specific qualities and behavior are not predictable at a fine scale using statistics or modeling, even if their general trends are reliable in the aggregate: beyond a certain density of cars, traffic jams become increasingly likely, as with termites and termite mounds and a generally upward trending stock market.

But here is where we leave the termites and traffic jams behind: There are such things as brilliantly innovative and successful companies, artists, and scientists who catalyze revolutionary change.  But their brilliance is never isolated from the context of the world in which they live and breathe. The popular model of genius as an exclusive property of special individuals would hold that Einstein would have had equivalent breakthroughs if he was born in the 1960s or the 1460s. This is of course not an experiment that we can run. But if we accept that the age in which he lived was shaped by his genius, shouldn't we entertain the possibility that his genius was shaped by the age he lived in and the people he worked with? What if we look at geniuses as emergent manifestations of the collective context in which they were embedded?  

It is beyond the scope of this work to answer such questions definitively. It is focused instead on exploring a corollary question:  What can we learn at a fine timescale about how innovative ideas are brought about through collective creativity? If the power of genius as a property of the individual has indeed been overstated, what are the mechanisms through which the genius of the collective operates?  What can this teach us about designing collective materials, activities, and environments that foster creativity?

### Collective Creativity

Collective creativity has been a topic of study in many disciplines, from business and management (Catmull, E. 2008; Parjanen, S. 2012) to education (Tang et. al 2020; Vygotsky, L. S. 1990), to literature and the sciences (Fischer & Vassen 2011; Monechi et. al. 2019), to psychology (Sawyer, R. K., & DeZutter, S. 2009). While specific definitions vary by discipline, there is general agreement that collective creativity refers to the emergence of innovative ideas from a group of individuals working with a shared purpose. The most poetic definition comes from the musician Brian Eno (Frere-Jones, A. 2014), who refers to collective creativity as “Scenius,” a collective form of genius that emerges from a “scene” of people who share an interest (such as an art scene or a music scene). 

This research aims to develop our understanding of collective creativity through the design and documentation of hands-on tinkering workshops. Tinkering is an approach to playfully engaging with and learning about various phenomena through iterative, improvisational, and exploratory hands-on creative design (Bevan et. al. 2015). It is a further articulation of a learning theory developed by Seymour Papert called constructionism (Papert 1982). The pedagogy of tinkering was developed for non-formal learning environments like makerspaces and science centers by the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium Science museum (Vossoughi & Bevan, 2014).

Libraries are also non-formal learning environments. Today many libraries are interested in exploring new means of supporting social creativity and learning for citizens (Jochumsen et al., 2010). Dokk1 of Aarhus Public Libraries has been the primary site for much of this research as well as a co-sponsor of this PhD Project. Together with librarian educators from Aarhus Public Libraries, I have been exploring strategies for developing a pedagogy of creativity and learning in the library. This work takes inspiration from constructionism and the Reggio Emilia approach, a pedagogy of early childhood creativity and learning developed by the children and teachers of Reggio Emilia, Italy. The goal was to develop the capability to do practitioner based research in Dokk1 while engaging citizens in creative tinkering activities, some of which will be designed to elicit collective creativity. 

The educator who practices the Reggio Emilia approach is also a practitioner-researcher whose objective is to understand children’s learning and how to support it. The data of that research consists of Documentation, which Krechevsky et. al. (2013) defined as “The practice of observing, recording, interpreting and sharing through a variety of media the processes and products of learning in order to deepen and extend learning.” Much of the existing body of theory developed in this tradition is concerned with aesthetics and its relationship to children’s learning (Vecchi, 2010). Through collective reflection on Documentation of children’s explorations, Reggio educators develop theory to explain observations and guide interventions. Part of this research is about reinterpreting the Reggio Emilia approach to Documentation in the context of the library, and using it to explore the following research question: (RQ1) How can we create the conditions for library educators to have a dialog between theory and practice that could enable them to develop a pedagogy of creativity and learning in the library? 

The second portion of this research focuses on running and documenting tinkering activities that are designed to invite participants of all ages and backgrounds into an experience of collective creativity. The research question is: (RQ2) How do we design open-ended activities and documentation strategies that encourage collective creativity? A relevant sub question is: How can we catalyze the cross-pollination of ideas in collectively creative activities, and is there evidence that this leads to the emergence of new ideas? 

Seymour Papert once said "You can't think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something." Thinking and experimenting with collective creativity also needs a 'something' around which the collective can be creative. In this research that something is called *Playing with the Sun,* a project founded by myself and Ben Mardell of Harvard Project Zero. *Playing with the Sun* seeks to create the conditions for children to develop an intuitive sense of how sustainable sources of energy work, and to develop strategies for collectively tinkering toward how to live sustainably and well. In this the initial phase, I have been collaborating with Mark Moore and the teknologiforståelse team at Dokk1 library to develop an open-source construction kit to enable learners to tinker with sustainable forms of energy.[^1] Several open-ended tinkering activities are being developed using this construction kit, each of which are featured in the articles.

*Playing with the Sun* is practice based research. It asks the following question: *How can we create the conditions for children to develop their understanding of how sustainable energy works through short-term tinkering experiences?* The goal is to develop a foundation for basic literacy in the area, not produce the next generation of engineers. A second but equally important goal is to experiment with the design of shared learning experiences that make use of collective creativity.  At time of writing, most citizens are content to wait while experts in universities and corporations try to solve the technical and design elements of the climate emergency. To answer the question of how to transform the way we live,  it may someday become important for citizens to engage with the problem more directly, along the lines of Eric Von Hippel's research into distributed and free innnovation. Perhaps a playful, shared design process built around libraries in local communities could form a foundation for this. 

*Playing with the Sun* is the primary interface with the Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting project [^2] (EER) , a collaboration between the Interacting Minds Centre in Aarhus University and Studio Olafur Eliasson, which is also a co-sponsor of this PhD project. EER invites the public to participate in experiments designed to create new knowledge about perception, decision-making, action, notions of togetherness, collaboration, and the transmission of knowledge. The primary area of overlap and focus with EER is in building knowledge about collaboration and transmission of knowledge in the context of collectively creative activities.

All of the work can be categorized as explorations of the design space of playful and creative exploration, a topic which crosses several disciplinary boundaries. In the discipline of Design, it is concerned with prototyping, group design processes, documentation, and reflection. In Psychology, it intersects with arguments about ideation and the nature of creativity itself.  In Education, it explores means of designing and framing open-ended creative learning experiences, and how these connect to the insights of the preceding fields. 

A unifying theme that touches on all these disciplines comes from the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who is credited with cofounding the fields of cybernetics and family therapy.  Bateson believed that the processes of creativity and learning are fundamentally analogous at the scale of the individual person and the scale of the planet. 

> "We face, then, two great stochastic systems that are partly in interaction and partly isolated from one another. One system is within the individual and is called learning, the other is immanent in heredity and in populations and is called evolution. One is a matter of a single lifetime; the other is a matter of multiple generations of many individuals." (Bateson, 2002)

Creativity and learning are part of a dialog between the individual and her surroundings, a dialog that is open-ended. And that process is embedded within a larger process of the evolution of ideas, itself a part of planetary evolution. According to Bateson, these are all fundamentally the same kinds of processes operating at different scales. Though it will never be possible to predict the behavior of individual learners or of evolution, the fact that the dialog of both learning and evolution is systematic over time means that we can try to understand the patterns that emerge and make useful generalizations about them. One way to do that is to look for theories that have explanatory power and utility for practitioners at all scales and use them to design experiments. 

### The Adjacent Possible and Tinkering

“The adjacent possible consists of all those things (depending on the context, these could be ideas, molecules, genomes, technological products, etc.) that are one step away from what actually exists, and hence can arise from incremental modifications and recombinations of existing material.” (Tria et al., 2015)

The adjacent possible is a theory for understanding the exploration of a space of possibilities which the biologist and complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman first proposed as an explanation for speciation in the fossil record. Simply put, the adjacent possible is what’s next door to whatever state something is in right now. Before the Post-It note existed, it was an adjacent possible of the plain paper note taped to a wall. Once invented, the Post-It note became an “actual” from which new adjacent possibles could emerge in various realms, everything from making fish scales in craft activities to a tool for organizing and reorganizing collections of thoughts in design meetings.

Each time an adjacent possible transitions into an “actual,” it changes the space of possibilities not only for itself but also for the entire system of which it is a part. As a result, each movement into an adjacent possible is not only a potential optimization within the current context, but also has the potential to be the introduction of a new evolutionary niche from which new adjacent possibles can emerge. Kauffman (2014) provides an example from the evolution of the swim bladder, which allows fish to maintain neutral buoyancy at different heights within the water column. Thought to have evolved from the primitive lungs of a lungfish, the swim bladder made possible a new ecological niche in the oceans which thousands of species soon evolved to fit into.

In the realm of technology, one could describe the adjacent possible with the story of the development of the mouse-driven graphical user interface (GUI), or windowed computing, at Xerox Parc. Prior to the existence of the GUI, human computer interaction was mostly limited to typing text commands into a terminal. The GUI began as an adjacent possible to the terminal, but once it existed it made possible a new form of interactivity on which much of the subsequent history of computation has been dependent. So the discovery of an adjacent possible like this is not simply the story of a discrete and immediate evolutionary advancement. In some cases, as with the swim bladder and the GUI, it is the creation of an entirely new ecological niche that subsequently enables a near infinity of adjacent possibles. Kauffman points out that this quality of the adjacent possible opening up new domains of possibility has profound implications for science because it renders our world “un-prestateable” - meaning that evolution of domains like genetics, economics, culture, and technology will never be made algorithmically predictable beyond a very short time horizon (Kauffman 2014). 

If one were to design a pedagogy for teaching people to navigate the adjacent possible in the context of technology and design, it would probably share many qualities with the pedagogy of tinkering. Tinkering is a means of playfully engaging with and learning about various phenomena through iterative, improvisational, and exploratory hands-on design processes (Bevan et. al. 2015). Tinkering activities are open-ended, in that the specific outcomes of what will be designed or built are not known at the start. Resnick & Rosenbaum describe it this way:

> “Sometimes, tinkerers start without a goal. Instead of the top-down approach of traditional planning, tinkerers use a bottom-up approach. They begin by messing around with materials (e.g., snapping LEGO bricks together in different patterns), and a goal emerges from their playful explorations (e.g., deciding to build a fantasy castle). Other times, tinkerers have a general goal, but they are not quite sure how to get there. They might start with a tentative plan, but they continually adapt and renegotiate their plans based on their interactions with the materials and people they are working with.” (2013)

The process of tinkering is exploratory, in that the tinkerer is constantly trying new things, observing and reflecting on whatever comes of them, and then deciding on which thing to try next. Like evolution through exploration of the adjacent possible, it is teleonomic: It proceeds stepwise, evaluating as it goes, in a direction that seems productive. Often different people end up with different results that reflect their individual choices about which adjacent possibles to explore.

We can contrast this with more formal pedagogies whose goal is to arrive at a distinct conclusive state, which we can describe as teleological.  Such an approach is only concerned with evaluation of adjacent possibles in so far as they are the shortest path to a pre-defined and distinct solution - often a correct answer. 

Not all of the actions of a tinkerer could be described as explorations of adjacent possibles. For example, suddenly choosing to change topics or goals at a high level, like switching from building a car to building a castle, could not be seen as exploring adjacent possibles (at least at a fine scale). However, once the goal of building a castle is decided, choosing to build a drawbridge or man the turrets with the toy action figures at hand would qualify as adjacent possibles, and so might repurposing a nearby stuffed animal as a dragon. Once a frame is set, children’s play often looks like the exploration of adjacent possibles in design, narrative, or both.

To provide another counterexample, assembling a Lego kit by following step-by-step instructions to reach a predetermined outcome is not an exploration of the adjacent possible (and neither is it a creative act). Any creative exploration of the adjacent possible requires the ability to select an adjacent possibility from what exists now, and then convert it into an actual by prototyping it. Next the creator must evaluate what new adjacent possibles arise as a result of their prototype, and then choose which new adjacent possible to actualize next. This iterative process of evaluating and prototyping cannot occur if the goal is to reach a predetermined end state, such as the creation of the model shown on the cover of a Lego box. Following step-by-step instructions is as creative as taking dictation: which is to say, not at all. 

The creative process of tinkering is described by Resnick’s Creative Learning Spiral (Resnick, 2017). The child in kindergarten sits down with wooden blocks or finger-paints, imagines something to build, creates it, plays with it, shares it with friends, reflects and evaluates it before imagining a change or new possibility or refinement, creating that, and iterating through the spiral again, etc. etc. Resnick argues that this process is fundamentally analogous to what graduate students at MIT Media Lab are doing as they explore and develop cutting edge technologies (2017).

This process is similar to the role of prototyping in design and design-based research. As Lim et. al. (2008) describe it, “Prototypes are used as a means to frame, refine, and discover possibilities in a design space.” This is particularly important when the objective is not just to solve problems, but to discover new problems to pose. But whereas the prototype operates on a somewhat larger timescale of several prototypes per week, month, or year, tinkering involves modifying a tinkerable construction kit several times every few minutes and then observing to see what that change does to its behavior or to its aesthetics. In both cases, the goal is to propose a new possibility, and then reflect on and get feedback about it before making another change.

In the case of drawing machines, a class of tinkering activities first developed by the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium, the explorer of adjacent possibles might wonder what would happen if they move the motor 1 cm to the left, or what might happen if they try a differently shaped drive wheel. Many, and even perhaps most of these small changes don’t lead to anything interesting. But some do. They lead to new ideas and explorations of further adjacent possibles. It’s not necessary and sometimes unhelpful to have a specific goal or end-state in mind.  New areas of interest and directions for further inquiry tend to emerge out of the process of tinkering (Petrich et al., 2013). 

For example, the sub-theme of “writing machines” - drawing machines that make repetitive marks that resemble writing, is a realm of adjacent possibles often encountered in drawing machine workshops. If the builder stumbles upon drawings that look like writing and finds it interesting, they may decide to explore this possibility space by making small changes to explore what else is possible that still looks like writing. In one case study that will be described in further detail in *Collective Creativity in Open-Ended Creative Experiences*, a pair of tinkerers working with a solar drawing machine activity I developed stumbled upon marks which they named “solargraphy” - as in writing by the sun. After exploring a different realm of possibilities inspired by their neighbors, they subsequently chose to return to the exploration of solargraphy. This sort of discovery of interesting sub-themes of the adjacent possible is not uncommon in tinkering workshops, and a good example of how something unplanned and emergent can shape subsequent explorations.

The qualities of the environment surrounding each tinkerer will have a strong effect on their own exploratory potential, and also on the potential for collaborative and possibly emergent explorations. Innovation comes more from groups than from individuals, as a growing collection of research suggests (Sawyer, 2007). So the qualities and characteristics of the environment, especially the social environment, are likely to be important factors. How individuals communicate and how power is negotiated are just two of the many important factors that are often communicated through environmental cues.  

This is part of the reason why much of this work takes place in the library, a democratic social space, and why so much of it is concerned with the design of a broad range of qualities, from activity design to facilitation strategies. All of these are important qualities of environments that support tinkering, and by extension, likely to be important for supporting collective exploration of the adjacent possible. By designing, deploying, reflecting on, and continually iterating on provocations designed to invite collective creativity, I intend to use the library as a laboratory for understanding how to design contexts for collective creativity and to explore inductively its important elements. 

[^1]: A construction kit in this context refers to a collection of materials designed to enable learning through open-ended, interest-driven creative projects. Pico Crickets, Little Bits, and LEGO Technic are all examples of highly developed and refined construction kits.
[^2]: See: [https://eer.info](https://eer.info/)



## To Do / Feedback to be integrated:

1. Too many tangential ideas. Need to rewrite for clarity.
2. Needs climate crisis as organizing / motivating principle from the start.
3. Clearer introduction to what is being studied / what will be explained.


