On Creativity

Image On Creativity

On April 17, Hybrid Plattform was invited to take part in the podium debate "Creative Dialog", hosted by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin together with Kunstuniversität Linz, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, and Medizin-Universität Graz. The four universities have come together to create a platform for creativity research.

What is creativity? After World War II, creativity research was considered a part of the psychology of intelligence. During the Cold War, in direct reaction to the so-called Sputnik Shock, research on creativity and, in particular, on the creative person was heavily supported. Divergent thinking opposed to convergent thinking was promoted as a relevant personality trait of creative minds. Since then, the concept of creativity has been substantially expanded (thematically and in terms of disciplines) and, amongst other components, the creative process itself has become more relevant. Thus two weeks ago, speakers from diverse academic backgrounds and practical fields of expertise highlighted different aspects of the creative process with a specific focus on the times, spaces and situations of creativity.

Creativity is a complex theme and relevant to the interdisciplinary approach of research and teaching at Hybrid Plattform. During the panel discussion, I gave some insight into our understanding of transdisciplinary (social and cognitive) processes of collective creativity. How does one create situations for artists and designers, scientists, scholars and researchers in which they benefit from other perspectives, methods and concepts and raise the level of their own talent? It is a complex theme... in particular due to the specific situations, groups, themes, goals, financial and temporal conditions, etc. of transdisciplinary projects.

For us it is interesting to understand, at what point the new idea or knowledge arises in collaborative processes. Often crisis, irritation, surprise and productive friction are the moments in which the new appears or something new is created together. Such moments are manifold in processes of social creativity, but are mostly ephemeral. These creative processes are characterized by a high awareness of one's own and the other's perspective, knowledge and skills, and they ask for a reflective practice. As Donald A .Schoen states:

"It is through surprise, that we come to generate new forms of understanding. The surprise interrupts the routine, spontaneous activity. And then in response to surprise, the inquirer reflects both on the surprising phenomenon and on how she has been thinking about it. Thus thought turns back on itself and on the phenomenon being thought about. And one then restructures how one was thinking about this phenomenon. [...] These are idealised moments. The whole process can go very quickly, and I might add, can take place without words."

If we assume a correlation between inter- and transdisciplinary research and a high potential of creativity and innovation while producing new knowledge, then the configurations of the common work and exchange processes in terms of time, space, communication and reflection are crucial for a successful transdisciplinary concept. This is exactly what we are currently working on at Hybrid Plattform while assembling our experiences of the first four years of our pilot phase. Some results were already published in Hybrid Plattform's accompanying research study "From Collision to Cooperation". At the moment we are concluding the concept for the next two years and have just submitted a research paper for the anthology: "The Power of Distributed Perspectives" (part of the series "Berlin Studies in Knowledge Research"). So you can expect more thoughts on Hybrid Plattform's work and aims to be published soon – stay tuned!

– Julia