- Organization of the Symposium
- Additional Workshop Topics
- Previous Related Workshops
- Papers for Background Reading
Social Creativity and Meta-Design
Although creative individuals are often thought of as working in isolation, the role of interaction and collaboration with other individuals is critical. Social creativity emphasizes that the heart of intelligent human performance is not the individual human mind but minds in interaction with each other and in interaction with tools, artifacts and media. A perspective of social creativity casts new light on many familiar cognitive processes, such as education, design, community and information technology.Meta-design characterizes objectives, techniques, and processes for creating new media and environments that allow users to act as designers who both contribute to, and benefit from, the creativity of a larger group. Most prominent examples of large-scale creative design, such as open source software projects, involve technically-oriented participants working in technical domains. A fundamental objective of meta-design is to create socio-technical environments that allow people from a wide range of backgrounds to be active and informed participants in creative design processes that are personally meaningful and relevant.
Organization of the Symposium
The goal of the International Symposium is to develop a shared understanding among participants of what social creativity means and of various ways to support it through meta-design.Many people have noted the relation between structure and creativity. As an exercise in meta-design, we propose the following structure for the symposium.
Day 1: Technologies and Experiences
The first full day of working sessions will focus on concrete prototypes, case studies, empirical data, etc. Each session will consist of a series of brief presentations followed by open discussion. The presentations on Day 1 (represented by the vertical elements of the figure to the right) will provide a shared grounding for the more theoretical discussions of Day 2.Day 2: Concepts and Frameworks
Working sessions during the second day will focus on key conceptual issues (represented by the horizontal elements of the figure) that cut across the applications presented during Day 1. We will attempt to build conceptual frameworks that allow us to identify and understand requirements for systems supporting social creativity and meta-design.Day 3: Synthesis
In the final sessions, we will attempt to synthesize the ideas and discussions of the first two days under the main themes of the workshop. Our goal is to build a shared conceptual structure (represented by the woven elements of the figure) that weaves together applied and theoretical perspectives of social creativity and meta-design, and indicates directions for future investigations into to themes.Additional Workshop Topics
The symposium will stress active and informed participation by all participants. We encourage all conference participants to contribute their experience on the themes of the symposium, as well as to contribute additional topics that can broaden or deepen our understanding of the themes.Topics for Discussion Include, but are not limited to the following:
- Social structures and theoretical frameworks for individual and social creativity
- Boundary Objects: Creating Shared Understanding
- Putting Owners of Problems in Charge
- From Access to Informed Participation
- Communities of Practice and Communities of Interests
- Open Source Communities, including as examples: Jun for Smalltalk, Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory, Chessboard, Swiki, Dynasite, Groove, courses-as-seeds, .......
- Process models and computational support for collaborative design
- Substrates for Meta-Design
- Revisiting the Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, and Reseeding Process Model
Previous Related Workshops
Collective Creativity
NAIST, August 2000For details see: http://ccc.aist-nara.ac.jp/sakigake2000/.
"Collective creativity is a term coined to describe the phenomenon where concepts and understanding emerge in people's mind through interacting with knowledge in the world, including with external representations, with other people, or with computer systems." - Kumiyo Nakakoji
LifeLong Learning and Organizational Memory - Designing the Future by Understanding the Successes and Failures of Today
A PFU / L3D Workshop, May 27-30, 1999, Breckenridge, ColoradoFor details see: http://www-l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~l3d/pfu-l3d-ws99/.
Papers for Background Reading
Gerhard Fischer: Symmetry of Ignorance, Social Creativity, and Meta-Design, Special Issue on "Creativity & Cognition 1999" of the International Journal "Knowledge-Based Systems," Elsevier Science B.V., Oxford, UK, Vol 13, No 7-8, 2000, pp 527-537Gerhard Fischer, Ernesto Arias, Hal Eden, Andrew Gorman, and Eric Scharff: Transcending the Individual Human Mind-- Creating Shared Understanding through Collaborative Design, ACM Transaction on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) Vol. 7, No. 1, March 2000, pp. 84 - 113. [available at http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/tochi2000.pdf]