# Chapter 4: Implications of Research

Amos Blanton
Outline Draft April 17

## Outline

This chapter summarizes the implications of this research with regards to new **methods**, empirical data, and **theoretical contributions**.

1. **Methodological contributions:** The research was to develop a method for collective creativity at two different levels:

**A. A new method for doing research into collective creativity in tinkering activities**

- Method described in Short Term ecology paper and recursive prompting paper captures useful insights about the movement of ideas in collectively creative activities.

- It gives insight into the workings of collective creativity on a short time scale.
- It can be iterated on and used to learn more. f.x. in a non-formal context like a science museum or library it could be a basis for ongoing practice based research.
- It is inexpensive in terms of costs / resources of materials. Even if it does take more time than most library educators are used to allocating to a single area of inquiry. It's a lot cheaper than ethnography, and should yield different but complementary insights.
- The recursive prompting work shows directions for future design based inquiry, and frames several problems in the design of the method. These may not be that hard to overcome.
- There's a need for a change in the structure to allow participants to get familiar with the materials and practices before asking them to select a sub-prompt or area of the recursive prompting board in which to situate their further exploration. Not that hard to try.
- Different prompt strategies may better support the collective exploration, and encourage people to see past work as useful sources of insight to build on.

- Weaknesses in the method as a means of doing research on collective creativity

- It is not repeatable in a strict sense. The laws of physics are the same everywhere, but culture, learning, and creativity are not. Nonetheless, this could be a means of exploring those differences across cultures, populations, etc. which could lead to further useful insight. f.x. Are some populations or cultures better able to tinkering into collective creativity than others? If so, why? There are implications for education.

- None of the methodological strategies developed as part of this research has been tested often enough. Recursive prompting, especially, met only one of it's three success criteria in the latest formal experiment. Viewing the creation of the method as a design project, it is still in its early to middle stages.

**B. A method for doing practice-based research in the library through Reggio Emilia inspired Documentation as a reflective practice**

- The goal of this was to explore methods practitioner researchers could use together to explore things like collective creativity. While we were successful at laying the foundations for practitioner based research, the pandemic set us back such that there wasn't time to focus this research on collective creativity. (Even if we did create an environment for collectively creativity design on the construction kit and activities of playing with the sun). So, I never closed that circle.

- Part of the method was to create the conditions for practitioner researchers to practice reflective documentation as a method in Dokk1. The hope was that it would lead to a shift in role from practitioner to practitioner researcher. That proved more challenging than I thought, even aside from the loss of time caused by the pandemic.

- I didn't research the conditions well enough at the start. There are very few children in the age range I normally work in in Dokk1 (or the age range for playing with the sun.) So while I had hoped to have ideal conditions for iterative design and feedback process while simultaneously lay the foundation for a small community of tinkerers, that didn't happen. Instead, it cost the design teams a great deal of time and logistical energy just planning and arranging to work with children (which I had assumed would cost us almost nothing because we could just allow kids walking by to drop intothe activities. ) This drastically reduced our ability to get feedback and iterate on the design. I had hoped every other week we could step outside of our makerspace door and setup something on a table for passersby to play with and then reflect on it, leading to many iterations of small insights - almost an environmental requirement for quality in the design of tinkering experiences. Instead it required hours of logistical work by the team, especially the project coordinator.
- Viewed somewhat cynically, GDPR is an excellent way to put a stop to or hamper documentation research or ethnographic research in general. By adding massive bureacratic overhead with potentially disasterous but nebulous conseuqences for failure, it creates a chilling effect for practitioner researchers. Many practitioner educators have simply learned never to take photographs of children that are identifiable. This means we have no access to faces, the primary means of understanding emotional state / engagement of the learner.
- Denmark is a culture that puts great value on planning. For example: If you ask someone from Denmark why something went wrong, they will likely say that it's because someone didn't plan or think hard enough about it. Tinkering suggests an alternative explantion that is somewhat radical in all Western cultures, but perhaps even a bit more in the context of cultures that place great value on planning: Planning is limited because it doesn't give you information in the form of feedback from an encounter with the complexity of the real world. Therefore if things didn't go well, it may not be because of lack of planning, but because it wasn't tried out and tested enough. (Or because too much energy and time was spent planning that should have been spent trying something less-than-perfectly planned, and seeing how it goes.) Where planning is a process of contemplation, tinkering is a process of trying and seeing and reflecting (schon quote) and getting lots of feedback from the world in all its messy complexity. This feedback can be used to steer the process. Undoubtedly both planning and tinkering have value, and these are often complementary. But like most Western countries whose intellectual traditions are rooted in Plato and the Greeks, doing and then thinking and doing again is a harder sell than just thinking. But thinking without frequent encounters with reality is, in my view and the views of many others, overrated.
- Consider: Letbannen story as metaphor for explaining this.
- The consensus seems to be that there just isn't enough time in the extremely busy schedules of librarian educators to spend collecting and reflecting on documentation. Another way of putting this is that it's not clear to them what they will get out of investing more time in these processes (or how to go about changing the systems they are embedded in to make this possible.) Librarian educators are at the mercy of politicians who are often asking for more new things, such as projects or events. They do not generally have a nuanced understanding of quality in non-formal educational contexts. Instead they "treasure what they can measure." Therefore the majority of reports to important stakeholders consist of numbers like workshop attendees, etc. It can be difficult to see how to get them on board with a committment to reflection and the the consequent ability to do less countable things.
- Therefore, taking a page from Reggio, to change this system would require concerted effort at many levels. Politicians would need to be educated about the value of the educational approaches being used and refined in this context. That's an investment in itself, but one that could happen alongside a bigger committment to use documentation. Parents would have to be educated about the value of what their children are doing in playful learning experiences, so that they can recognize it. And the educators themselves would have to have a clearly defined definition of quality. There are no external systems pushing for this kind of reinvention of process (that would only bear fruit after a long period of time), and many that are pushing for resources to be spent on a variety of different content areas for quick and more or less certain gains.

- On the other hand, there is now a small team of librarian educators in Dokk1 who now have a good foundation in this methodology (as well as the accompanying theory).

- At least among team members, there is enthusiasm about tinkering. And signs of improved progress.
- One remarked "It's nice to have been part of the process of building a "thing" (referring to the construction kit.)
- They have a shared language around tinkering design - including concepts like "iteration", the importance of "reflection."
- They have tried out several reflective practices independent of this project - including Documentation of technical workshops, red / yellow / green post-workshop design reflections, and similar.
- It may be that a nudge towards a different kind of attention about learning can help things bear fruit, even years later. But it may also get filtered out by the environmental conditions the educators are in. It's difficult to say.
- It would have helped to have the originally planned 3 years to build these reflective processes, instead of the 1.5 left after the pandemic.

2. **Empirical data gathered about collective creativity**

- The experiment described in the short-term ecology article suggests that ideas do evolve, and that we can create a "fossil record" of those ideas using documentation.
- The data around recursive prompting / cross-polination suggests some interesting conclusions, and areas for further research:
- As proposed by one interlocutor, "collective creativity" can be viewed as a skill. If that's true, it's one that can (should?) be supported in its development by pedagogy.
- Does having the data presented as a map or "board" using a tool like Milanote make the method accessible to researchers using other theoretical backgrounds, and other methods (complementary or otherwise.) Possilble, but yet to be proven.
- People play many different roles in collectively creative experiences. The framing of "so and so had an idea" is clearly insufficient in these contexts. This agrees with Sawyer and Von Hippel's work which also highlights how collective creativity emerges out of communities with different people playing different roles.
- The data around using documentation as a strategy for librarian educators described in the case study suggests:
- It would be possible to utilize this as a method of reflection, theory generation, and professional development, given the right conditions. A non-formal institution like a library could build on these insights, at least as a starting point
- Documentation practices do lead to insights and framings that, in aggregate over time, could lead to the development of new theory customized for the library. The insights about the roles of parents and grandmothers in supporting children's creativity seem particularly relevant here. If librarian or other non-formal educators can generate theory to explain how best to work with adult caregivers, it would likely be useful in many different contexts.
- Similarly, the idea of "handlemod" which emerged out of discussions seems applicable to all educators working with creative learning. The documentation of and reflection on various means of intervening with low-handlemod learners would likely lead to useful frameworks and insights that could be broadly shared.
3. **Theoretical Contributions**
- The thesis argues that the pedagogy of Tinkering can be used as a means of systematically exploring the adjacent possible, an idea that has its theoretical foundation in biology and to a lesser extent design.
- It argues why these ideas from very different disciplines are compatible.
- And it describes the implications of the synthesis of these two ideas and why this has value.
- It demonstrates how the idea of the adjacent possible can usefully be put into practice to inform the design of a method for analyzing and presenting data about exploratory creativity.
- It argues for Bateson's contention that learning and evolution are fundementally analagous processes operating at different scales.
- For theory about practice-based research, it argues that the method of reflective practice from Reggio Emilia can usefully inform a design process in a different context: a library. It didn't succeed in yielding insights that could transform that context. Some reasons for this failure are described, which can be useful for other educators interested in non-formal learning and reflective practice.

-- End Draft