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Creative Acts beyond Dissemination

Last week Ryan and I were in DC at Creativity and Cognition 2007 (C&C) where we ran a workshop on Supporting Creative Acts Beyond Dissemination.

In its 6th year, C&C addresses creativity in both theory and practice. The research aims to provide us all with a deeper understanding of the creative processes. The conference was amazing and we were excited to be there: see it in Jean-Baptiste’s Flickr set. All of the attendees have a similar goal: to enable more people to be creative more of the time.

In our workshop, we began to think about new forms of digital creativity, one with a blurred distinction between creator-centric and experience-centric creativity. In attendance, we had a diverse set of participants (artists, dancers, research directors, business consultants, and a few computer/information scientists). Bringing together this set of people to discuss a common theme was a phenomenal experience. Each of us presented and discussed our perspective on how creativity works across a variety of domains. It’s good to see how artists and engineers intersect and connect ideas (we built a concept map of the work to show some of these connections). We then reconsidered models that cleanly separate the two, and began to seek out new models in which the user of a creative work takes on a generative role, not just an interpretive or interactive one.