Creativity and (through, Supporting, ...) Cognition

Washington, D.C.
I'm spending the next couple of days at the Creativity & Cognition conference here in Washington. Ernest Edmonds begins by noting that the conference series itself (which has been running since 1993) started from the intention to bring together artists and scientists, and that it's been successful at setting the seeds for increased collaborations between the fields; indeed, questions around creativity and innovation have become highly central to many projects and programmes in scientific research and beyond.

The first keynote speaker this morning is Mitch Resnick from MIT's Media Lab. Interested in building a more creative society, he notes that how (not what) children learn in kindergarten sets them up for life; the learning and creative thinking processes explored by kids in kindergarten must therefore be examined in more detail. This might include playful building work, the combination of materials, collaboration, exploration of ideas, and a number of other forms - Mitch suggests a process moving through stages in which kids imagine, create, play, share, reflect, and imagine again. Unfortunately, however, such processes do not continue to be encouraged throughout the rest of students' lives; learning turns much more into a process of information transmission from teacher to student.

How can a kindergarten approach to learning and creative thinking be transferred to other learning environments? How may new technologies be utilised in this context - without oversimplifying the more complex problems faced by students in higher levels of learning? Such technologies must have a low floor - be highly accessible, immediately - but also a high ceiling - their uses must stretch to significantly more complex applications. At the same time, Mitch suggests, they must also have wide walls - they must enable users to follow many different pathways and still arrive at the same level of knowledge. (This precondition is met for example by many of the materials commonly available in kindergarten, which often still are direct descendants of the materials invented for the first kindergartens themselves - such as coloured shapes and building blocks.)

Today, pursuing similar affordances in online spaces is becoming increasingly important - this means a move away from mere interactivity to more intercreativity, and Mitch now demonstrates a new programming game for kids called Scratch which allows for such creative play. It stands in line with earlier creative tools such as the Logo programming language, but reinvents such ideas for the current context; it offers what could be described as an accessible programming interface for media mashups. Importantly, Scratch also includes the means to share the materials which are created in this context, thus developing what Mitch describes as a 'shared literature' for Scratch (one of the key shortcomings of Logo, which merely provided a common grammar), enabling new users to look at and learn from existing content, and providing a basis for collaboration. Finally, the project also encourages reflection beyond the specific work, thereby giving participants a better sense of their own creative processes, and feeds such reflections back into continuing imaginative processes.

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