MGMT 239 Play in Culture and

Invention

4. Cognition and Creativity

Ted Tschang
Recap of last lesson

• Design thinking process

• Phases: Empathy (deemphasize)  problem definition 
ideation  prototyping  validation  testing
• Tools, method (how-to) and purposes of each phase
• Characteristics:
• Iterative, collaborative, problem-solution space iteration
What design thinking emphasizes: e.g. of
Jewel
• Problem spaces are defined by clients (briefs)
• e.g. redefine the Changi airport experience for non-airport
users
• If problems (within problem space) defined by design
thinking, around users’ needs:
• Class project e.g.s: in-flight dining simulator, travelator
• What actually happened: Jewel
• But what if (prof likes that) they employed more what-
ifs: Jewel?
• What if we use the terminal, counters, etc.
• What if we use the space differently
• What if people went there to actually have fun…
Recap of last lesson: comparing types of
design
• Museum visit
• Designer-driven view
• TeamLab likely to be more freeform, own methodology
fusing art and tech.
• Concepts may be generative, but need problem space
and concept should be oriented to the problem space.
• How does it relate to design thinking and design
• Designed through different design domains, e.g.
architecture, fashion
• not clear if human-centered design (thinking) was used
or just “design” (graphic design, design of interior spaces,
exhibits
How to adapt design thinking to playful
invention: some means for class,
project
• Process – emphasize creativity, prototyping phases
• Set up problems: Problem definition ‘phase’ is more fluid,
open-ended (not scoped narrowly, or user-centered)
• Variety of brainstorming methods
• Have many ideas - recombine, spawn new, etc.
• Focus on concepts (abstracted beyond the specific, instances of)
• Use design thinking’s rough prototyping media (and more)
• e.g. sketching (today’s), game designs can be paper prototyped,
user journeys can be storyboarded (not as interesting)
• Prototype “what you don’t know (the reaction to)”
• Play with (experiment with) your prototypes (recall drinking
play in Nussbaum), have ideas during it
 Jewel

"Jewel weaves together an experience of nature and the

marketplace, dramatically asserting the idea of the airport as an
uplifting and vibrant urban center, engaging travelers, visitors
and residents, and echoing Singapore’s reputation as ‘The City in
the Garden’." -Moshe Safdie *
Fulfilling its mission as a connector between the existing
terminals, Jewel combines two environments—an intense
marketplace and a paradise garden—to create a new
community-centric typology as the heart, and soul, of
Changi Airport. Jewel re-imagines the center of an airport as
a major public realm attraction. Jewel offers a range of
facilities for landside airport operations, indoor gardens,
leisure attractions, retail offerings and hotel facilities, all
under one roof. A distinctive dome-shaped façade made of
glass and steel adds to Changi Airport's appeal as one of the
world's leading air hubs.
Prelude to creativity: Issues with design
thinking: incrementalism
• Design outside Stanford often emphasizes incremental
outcomes: various reasons
• Not fundamental tech-based (Norman’s e.g. of human
computer interaction techs)
• Too user-centric
• Also not extreme users (or teams) – same on East Coast
• Practical clients, problems (e.g. improve hospital queues)
• Used to help users “get to stuff” (info, service process …)
• Vs. “have a new aesthetical (pleasurable) experience”
• Other kinds of design: domain-centric, or engineering
design (tends to emphasize functions and functionality)
• We go beyond this: play as creativity, experimentation
Going beyond the perceived problem space by
redefining the problem
• If sheer creativity doesn’t get us new ideas, think about
how actual creators work
• Need to go beyond Bateson’s simple “crossing
boundaries”
• We can get a view of how creators transform their
domain through Boden
• Differences between combinative, exploratory and
transformative creativity, based on e.g.s from art and
graphic design, science, writing.
• Note:
• She doesn’t dwell on the actual process that achieves the
creative artifact, but your essay should try to
Outline for today

• What is Creativity: definitions, process, mechanisms

• Types of creativity (Boden) – classification scheme and
what might be happening within structure of the
product
• combinative, exploratory, transformative
• Creativity and play
• Breaking boundaries
• Role of flow
• Tools, techniques
• Sketching - “collaboratively”
Creativity
Why study creativity in context? New
skills for the future? (NYT)
• …We no longer just want to have things; we want cool
things. We want well-designed things. We want things
with meaning. (see Oprah) *
• Now the master of fine arts, or M.F.A., Mr. Pink says, “is
the new M.B.A.” He’s not the only one saying it.**
• When General Motors hired Robert A. Lutz in 2001 to whip its
product development into shape, he (noted): “It’s more right
brain. It’s more creative,” he said.
• “I see us as being in the art business,” he said, “art,
entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally,
also happens to provide transportation.”
• When a car company like G.M. is in the art business, every
company in any other industry is, too.
First, what is creativity … different
facets: #1 knowledge creation
• What’s an example of a creative idea/product?
• Creativity is the ability to produce work that is both
novel (i.e. original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e.
useful, adaptive concerning task constraints)
Sternberg and Lubart, 1999

• What is the common thread of creativity?

• Its dialectical relation to intelligence and wisdom. *
• What about knowledge?
Creativity - #2 explained by cognitive
process, stages, skills
• Initial “mechanism” or effect observed was seemingly
inexplicable (unexplainable) cognitive acts
• Described as insight (“aha” moments) or just serendipity
• Caused by “unconscious mental processes”, letting the
mind wander (Kandel)
• (most well-known) Creative process
• stages – preparation, incubation, illumination, validation
• Mechanisms that may appear in the “aha” act of
insight – blending (conceptual combination),
analogizing
• Other ways of thinking about skills (Pink, Gardner)
What else explains the creativity of an
individual?
• Systems perspective on creators’ lives
• connecting knowledge within and without (external to)
the creator, concept of rules
• Attitude: Leading creators worry less about what’s
“appropriate” (explore, i.e., “play” with/around/on
ideas)
• Frames: Creator’s background provides different frames
or perspectives
• Disciplines, e.g. art vs. science
• Design (creative) domain
• Design perspectives (what else besides user?)
 System’s perspective of where a creator’s creativity
comes from (Csikszentmihalyi *)

• Explains the creator through their life

• Learn from the domain first in order to advance it (by
changing its rules, e.g. Mozart – see Boden)
• Background can shape thinking
• Family, society, etc.
• Field eventually accepts new rules

• Note: *may* be
partly useful for essay
but need to follow up
Creativity’s relationship with play…

• Creativity is about play (experimenting, breaking rules,

having safety)
• Creativity can be enhanced by playful processes
• What does Bateson’s article say?
Assessing creative output (types)
Boden: three forms of creativity
• Note: each of her forms may correspond to different
ways of thinking as well!
Types of creativity: Boden offers way of
deconstructing product by process, rules
• 1st cut: being H creative (historically, new to the world)
vs. P creative (personally, new to the self)
• How do we become H creative?
• Have to know domain somewhat, then bring something
new in, or build new domain (in between others, e.g. by
blending domains (problem spaces))
• E.g. Mozart’s life and thinking
• Notes:
• Is creativity general or specific (to domain)?
• E.g. Can a interior designer be an architect? Can a
musician be a game designer?
Boden: three types of creativity

• Depends on whether creator is:

• Applying the rules, or adapting, or changing them
• How do meanings change as a result?
• At the core, is it about blending or combinations
• Can be additive or superadditive
• Can also involve other transformations of
knowledge, e.g. extrapolation, analogy, exemplars,
generative etc.
• Note: what she calls combinatorial is more
incremental and less radical than what I call blending
Boden: three types of creativity

• To Boden, different types (degrees) of creativity

• distinguished by the types of psychological process that are
involved in generating the new idea. (Boden)
• 1. combinatorial creativity – generation of unfamiliar (and
interesting) combinations of familiar ideas
• 2. exploratory creativity – existing stylistic rules or
conventions are used to generate novel structures (ideas)
whose possibility may or may not have been realised before
the exploration took place.
• Note: This is what I consider blending or combining
• 3. transformational creativity – deep dimension of the
thinking style, or conceptual space, is altered…(by adding)
new rules, as well as dropping/varying old ones
Combinational creativity (incremental)

• Combinational creativity leads to the Generation of

unfamiliar (and interesting) combinations of familiar ideas
• Many descriptions of creativity are of this type, but it should
*not* be the only one (according to Boden)
• E.g. visual collage (in advertisements and MTV videos), much
poetic imagery, analogy (verbal, visual, or musical); and the
unexpected juxtaposition of ideas found in political cartoons
• My thoughts:
• She bases this definition on easily put-together combinations,
e.g. collages (or even video games changing content where
“cut and paste” is easier)
• The opposite may be true in other fields, e.g. in technologies,
combinations of components may create radical innovations
Exploratory and transformational creativity

• They’re both grounded in some previously existing, and

culturally accepted, structured style of thinking
• --what one can call a "conceptual space.”
• Both involve changing the rules or creating them significantly
• A conceptual space is both more limited and more tightly
structured. It may be a board-game, for example (chess or Go,
perhaps), or a particular type of music or painting, or a specific
way of visualizing the structure of molecules in chemistry.
• Vs. in (lesser) combinative creativity where
• Rules are applied as is, structure doesn’t change, way in which
you play are the same
• e.g. chess - the same board, properties of tokens, structure –if
some rules change (and gameplay changes).
Exploratory: existing stylistic rules, novel
structures, same style
• In exploratory creativity, the existing stylistic rules or
conventions are used to generate novel structures (ideas).
• How do we do that in a game?
• Recombining, changing (evolving) the rules:
• In testing the potential and limits of the adopted style,
exploratory creativity sometimes involves varying it too. Some
of the rules, conventions, or constraints that define the style
can be slightly altered, or “tweaked”
• Similar styles but new structures (so, still familiar looking)
• …they will clearly be “of a piece with” (in the same general
style as) the earlier, more familiar, examples. As such, they will
be readily intelligible, in terms of the methods of interpretation
already in place to understand the style.
Exploratory

• as existing stylistic rules or conventions…generate novel

structures
• E.g. Most Impressionists especially working after the first
• Cezanne, Gaugin
• E.g. scientists extending a field to understand a subfield
better (e.g. proving a theorem works for 3 or n dimensions
after the 2nd dimensional one)
 Boden: three forms of creativity
• exploratory– existing stylistic rules…novel
structures
Seurat’s
Parade (1889)
Pointillism

Eduard Manet,
What’s the problem
Music at the
Tuileries (1862) space – defined in
(“without terms of forms?
centralizing
composition” Claude Monet –
moving towards Water Lilies at Giverny
Impressionism) (1908) Impressionism
Transformational creativity - deep dimension
of… conceptual space, is altered
• Transformational is when all three change - Rules, structures and thinking
styles (of domain, creator’s need to think)
• Amazement, bewilderment, and incomprehension are caused rather by
transformational creativity. For it is this which leads to “impossibilist” surprise.
• The reason is that some deep dimension of the thinking style, or conceptual
space, is altered
• (altering dimensions)…structures can now be generated which could not be
generated before,
• (in contrast), in exploratory creativity the variation in style is relatively minor,
and relatively superficial.
• E.g.s
• Imagine altering the rule of chess which says that pawns can’t jump over other
pieces: they’re now allowed to do this, as knights always were. The result
would be that some games could now be played which were literally impossible
before.
• New art styles, e.g. Van Gogh, Impressionism, new scientific theories
 Boden: three forms of creativity
transformational– deep dimension…altered…(by) new
rules (thinking styles, structures altered)

Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937) - cubism

What’s the problem space – defined in terms of forms?
Where did Picasso “learn” this?
Jackson Pollock: dripping technique
Explorative vs. transformative

• Most artists and scientists (do)… exploratory creativity

• The distinction between "tweaking" and "transforming”
(rules of creating, etc.), and therefore between
exploratory and transformational creativity, is a matter
of degree.
• Note:
• When I use combinative, its referring to the mechanism, and
could still actually result in what Boden calls exploratory or
transformative, depending on *what* we are blending
• E.g. blending that removes or adds new rules
• E.g. Using chess pieces in a different game removes the rules
but still relying on their forms
e.g. of Blending of products - results in Boden’s
exploratory or transformational

Which is it? Exploratory or transformative? Why?

Hint: how does it differ from previous products/experiences?

From patent filing for windsurfing Xerox PARC’s Alto (PC) (1973)
board (1970) - Part of transformational period in
computing, because???
Linking Organizational and individual
creativity (video)
• A view of creativity and play
• [Link]
d_play?language=en

• Discuss how what we now think of creativity is

supported
 Architecture (Frank Gehry’s
Designing: Bilbao Guggenheim museum)

Transformational within
functional constraints
• Which transforms meanings
the most?
• Define the meanings

Furniture (Verner Panton) Product Design

(Kartell bookshelf)
Issues: is blending more than combinatory,
and hence, is transformative?

• Additional info on what helped cause Picasso’s radical

breakthroughs (as he experimented)?
• [Link]

• Closer to home (current era): Game designer Will Wright

• before (background, set on trajectory to create sims)
Realized he was having more fun playing with the
scenario/level creating tool than with the game itself
• Then, in The Sims: blended concepts together with idea for
architectural sim - became a virtual dollhouse
• What caused the blend?
• How do we characterize the problem/solution space?
e.g. in literature: Stephen Donaldson’s
fantasy plot
• Of the generative component processes considered
within the Geneplore framework, the one most directly
related to the Thomas Covenant series is conceptual
combination,
• by which previously separate concepts are merged to
form new units that can differ in important ways from
either of their constituent concepts.
Combining ideas in actual creative act

• Donaldson's (1991) account of the origins of that tale

reveals three important ingredients consistent with a
Geneplore framework:
• a specific generative process leading to a candidate idea,
the creative person noticing the potential in the idea, and
the use of exploratory processes to bring that potential to
fruition.
• He stated that, from as early as 1969, he wanted to
write a story dealing with the concept of "unbelief," a
rejection of fantasy, but that the idea remained
dormant until May 1972.
• “leprosy” was second concept he combined this with
Blending tool: Simple

• [Link]
me_to_come_up_with_original_ideas/transcript?language=
en#t-142541

• What creativity does this exhibit?

White et al
Linking play and creativity (or invention)
(Bateson): some dimensions (repeats)
• Characteristics (output, process)
• novel combinations (across boundaries)
• Playfulness, the defining feature of playful play, is a positive
mood state (or flow state)
• Intrinsic motivation
• Play as explorative process
• Play has features that are likely to make it especially suitable
for finding the best way forward in a world of conflicting
demands.
• Play may, therefore, fulfill an important probing role that
enables the individual to escape from false end-points or “local
optima‟
• Animal studies: rats, etc.
Linking play and creativity (Bateson):
exhibited in human activity
• Domains
• Art, music, some scientists (anecdotally)
• Design probably
• What about business? E.g.s? Why/why not?
• E.g. Artists at play,
• …playfulness in the work (e.g. Mozart’s pieces have a
lightness and frivolity).
• E.g. of scientists.
• Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do
whatever I felt like doing (Feynman, physics).
Exercise
•d
Summary

Creativity as
• being about creators lives
• Cognitive mechanisms (e.g. blending)
• Types of creativity in products (after the fact) (blends
etc., seen in rule changes)
• Boden’s combination, exploration, transformative
• Connecting play, creativity (invention)
• Play helps break boundaries, finding “interesting”
blends
Extra
7 skills for the future (a casual perspective) (Pink)
– with my interpretations (related to this class)

• Design
•  Inventing through creative thinking within a domain
• Story
•  Aspect of the designed experience
• Symphony
•  synthesis or systems thinking (seeing the whole), also relates to
crossing boundaries
• Play
•  As part of a playful invention process
• Meaning
•  Understanding (to meet) deeper, more emotive needs
• Empathy
•  Same as meaning, relates to understanding others (and users)
 What influenced creators? What
process/techniques did they use/create?
• In the 1990s, Gehry designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,
Spain. He draw his inspirations from the perpetually changing skies,
like Los Angeles. El Greco paintings with cloud constructions were his
inspiration too

View of Toledo, El Greco Bilbao Guggenheim museum, Frank Gehry

 What process/techniques
did they use/create?

• He starts his design by scribbling

a sketch that expresses the image of
the building. (In the Disney’s Concert
Hall his inspiration Sources were sails) 
• “I know I draw without taking my pen
off the page. I just keep going, and that
my drawings I think of them as scribbles.
I don’t think they mean anything to
anybody except to me, and then at the
end of the day, the end of the project
they wheel out these little drawings
and they’re damn close to what the
finished building is and it’s the drawing”
What “rules” were broken?

• Art: Throughout his career, Cubist artists Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and

Giorgio Morandi also influenced Gehry. This influence can be found in the
collage technique he uses in architecture. Gehry dismantles, re-assembles, and
layers building materials, like Cubist artists do.
• Music: Music is an admitted influence on Gehry. He listened to Jimi Hendrix's
song ''Purple Haze'' when he was designing the Museum of Pop Art in Seattle. In
evoking a rock n' roll experience, the energy and fluidity of music became his
inspiration.
• Movement: Whether through music or sculpture, movement is essential for
Gehry's architecture. Gehry is a sailor; he mentions sailing as an influence on his
movement-driven designs
• Play and cities: Gehry's buildings are an interplay of unusual volumes. There
comes his grandparents' influence. … In his childhood, Gehry and his
grandmother played with irregular pieces of scrap wood, like the forms of his
buildings. They made structures and cities on the kitchen floor. Gehry's
imagination was stimulated by his grandfather's hardware store too. Gehry built
imaginary cities from items he found there.
 What process/techniques
did they use/create?
• He continues developing the “Image of
the building” with the aide
of Models (Notice the amount of models
in the back of the picture).
• “I think my best skill as an architect
is the achievement of hand-to-eye
coordination. I am able to transfer a
sketch into a model into the
building”.
• The result of the design process is
a Sculptural building with an efficient
floor plan. (Notice the optimal
match Configuration of the ground-floor
to a concert hall)
• …they’re damn close to what the
finished building is and it’s the drawing”
An earlier non-traditional take on IQ:
Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences
• Types of intelligence:
• (1) Verbal/Linguistic, e.g. Stephen King
• (2) Logical/Mathematical, scientists (see EO Wilson*)
• (3) Visual/Spatial, e.g. all artists
• (4) Bodily/Kinesthetic, e.g. in dance, Martha Graham
• (5) Naturalistic, e.g. Lovelock
• (6) Musical Intelligence, e.g. Mozart
• (7) Interpersonal, empathy, e.g. Gandhi
• (8) Intrapersonal, self-reflection, knowing self
• Argued that major intellects reinvented domains with a
dominant intelligence,…
• Critics said “its not intelligence”, or too narrow etc.
beyond categories of multiple
intelligences
• Did people who contributed and shaped a particular
field outside of music and science, exhibit intellect
and creativity? e.g. environmental
• Rachel Carson, John Muir, Thoreau