Introduction
The last decade has seen an increasing focus on creativity and creative practice across a broad range of professional and educational settings. The contemporary business environment, for example, consistently highlights creativity as crucial for success, while the fields of architecture, art, design, film, music, and software design, among others, are now collectively referred to as the creative industries; a consequence of policy initiatives within advanced free market-oriented governments as they position these disciplines as pivotal to economic progress. Aligned with such developments, the field of creative writing is now currently one of the largest growth areas in tertiary education, and not far behind is creative technologies, an emergent field situated at the interdisciplinary nexus of science, mathematics, and new digital media, and motivated by the emergence of web-based technologies with their emphasis on social networking and creative production. Perhaps influenced by these different developments, attention to student creativity has also recently reappeared in the context of art and design education. This return follows a relative hiatus in the mid to late twentieth century, when the view of student creativity as an individual ability to be harnessed and developed was replaced by a conceptualisation of artistic production as something that could be taught according to standardised outcomes and formalised curricula.
This post-industrial resurgence of creativity presents a new challenge for both educators and researchers as they attempt to comprehend the increasingly complex and diverse senses of creativity and creative action as it occurs across these multiple sites and practices. Compounding this difficulty is the influence of social and cognitive psychological traditions in creativity studies , which to date, have largely viewed creativity as an essentialist and objectively measurable reality. These studies have largely focused on investigating the thought processes and personal attributes that underlie creative behaviour, mostly through the use of controlled experiments, computer models, or the evaluation of eminent artists’ and scientists’ lives, personalities, and processes. What typically informs this research is a taken-for-granted definition of creativity as the production of ideas or products that are both novel and useful (Mayer 1999; Kaufman and Sternberg 2010; Hennessey and Amabile 2010); a definition which is used whether creativity is viewed as a personal cognitive ability, of either gifted or normal individuals, or whether it is viewed as a socio-cultural phenomenon, where the idea or product’s creative worth is validated, often posthumously, by the larger community or gatekeepers of the domain in which it takes place (Csikszentmihalyi 1999). Nevertheless, regardless of the relative consensus regarding the definition of creativity and despite claims to scientific rigour, social and cognitive psychological creativity studies can produce quite divergent findings, even when they investigate similar types of creative practice and phenomena (Sternberg 2005).
The creative process of the highly influential twentieth-century modernist, Pablo Picasso , has been the subject of a number of such studies and these provide an example of how creativity research has traditionally treated the visual arts. One of Picasso’s most critically acclaimed works, Guernica , completed in June 1937, has been of particular interest to creativity researchers, primarily because he left a numbered and dated collection of preliminary sketches for the painting which purportedly enable a close examination of his creative processes. Using his preliminary sketches as evidence, these cognitive psychological studies have resulted in two contrasting descriptions of Picasso’s creative process.
The first argues that when examined in the order produced, Picasso’s preliminary sketches are said to show little systematic development towards the final composition of Guernica . Simonton (2007), an advocate of this position, points out that many of the figures found in the final work, such as the weeping woman, appeared only in the early preliminary sketches, while other figures in the sketches, such as Pegasus, failed to appear in the final version of Guernica at all. Hence, in the process of creating Guernica , Picasso generated various diverse and often unconnected sketches, without knowing at the time which of these he would eventually select for development into the final product, and it is only with the benefit of hindsight that any degree of continuity can be identified. Accordingly, this view of Picasso’s creative process for Guernica supports the conceptualisation of creativity as a messy and chaotic process, involving ‘false starts and wild experiments’ (Simonton 1999, p. 197), where an often gifted creator is unable to see where they are going until they eventually reach their destination.
In contrast, the second description of Picasso’s creative process, argues that the development of Guernica , involved a more ordered and structured process of exploration, whereby a coherent sequence of sketches was generated, each systematically building upon the preceding one, until an end result was obtained. The series of preliminary sketches are seen as arising from, and extending, a kernel idea, one which can even be seen as emerging well before Guernica . According to Weisberg (2006), for example, the figures found in the preliminary sketches, such as the bull and the horse, can be seen as having continuity with earlier compositions by Picasso , as well as with earlier works of other artists. This view of Picasso’s creative process for Guernica supports the conceptualisation that creativity is a systematic and straightforward step-by-step process, similar to ordinary everyday approaches for problem solving, rather than a series of unpredictable and chaotic leaps.
Not all psychological studies on Picasso’s creativity have focused solely on Guernica . Stokes (2006), for example, examines the collaborative development of cubism by Picasso and his close associate George Braque . In her attempt to understand the creative processes used by the artists to develop the ground-breaking new geometric new style of cubism , she suggests that the two artists consciously set specific constraints on their practice, most of which were a rejection of the prevailing representational style of the late nineteenth century. A first constraint precluded the painting of an object from a single point of view and instead promoted depicting the object from multiple viewpoints. A second constraint precluded reproducing the colours of the objects being depicted and instead promoted the use of a monochromatic palette, and a third precluded representing the illusion of depth and instead promoted the depiction of a flat and patterned picture surface. For Stokes , this supports a conceptualisation of creativity as involving the ability to move from a prior initial state to a novel goal state, which as seen here, necessarily involves a series of paired constraints: one of the pair preventing a conventional response to a problem, with the other promoting a novel outcome. These sets of paired constraints ultimately lead towards the creative goal state.
Although quite understated in her study, Stokes ’ inference that the creative development of cubism was a collaborative process involving both Picasso and Braque raises a point that is central to this book. As with many other creativity studies, what is absent from these largely decontextualised investigations of creativity and the creative process is attention to the interactions that artists have with other artists or their acquaintances and other individuals that were directly or indirectly involved in their creative practice, and furthermore, how these interactions might have shaped the ongoing development of the artists’ creative products and processes. This absence is particularly evident, for example, in Locher’s (2010) comprehensive overview of empirically based creativity research in the visual arts where there is no mention at all of verbal interaction or language use—even where studies involving creative practice within tea...