Distributed creativity: How collective creations emerge from collaboration.

By R. Sawyer, Stacy Lee Dezutter. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2009

482 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Creativity is often considered to be a mental process that occurs within a person’s head. In this article, we analyze a group creative process: One that generates a creative product, but one in which no single participant’s contribution determines the result. We analyze a series of 5 theater performances that were improvisationally developed in rehearsal by a theater group; over the course of these 5 performances, a collaborative creation emerged from the improvised dialogues of the group. We argue that in cases of creativity such as this one, it is inaccurate to describe creativity as a purely mental process; rather, this case represents a nonindividualistic creative process that we refer to as distributed creativity. We chose this term by analogy with studies of distributed cognition, which are well established in cognitive science, but have not yet had a substantial impact on creativity research. Our study demonstrates a methodology that can be used to study distributed creative processes, provides a theoretical framework to explain these processes, and contributes to our understanding of how collaboration contributes to creativity.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Mechanical Engineering, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bd5e034dfae4054552bce7f0c43b60514370a750

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Mechanical Engineering

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

A Sociocultural Theory of Creativity: Bridging the Social, the Material, and the Psychological (2020, background): “The notion of distributed creativity is used to capture the way in which collaborative creations emerge from improvised dialogues within the group rather than the isolated minds of group members (R. K. Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009).”
Empirically Studying Participatory Sense-Making in Abstract Drawing with a Co-Creative Cognitive Agent (2016, background): “As collaborators make complimentary and unexpected contributions, their shared product grows in an emergent manner that would be more creative than what each partner could achieve individually [30].”
Designing Creative AI Partners with COFI: A Framework for Modeling Interaction in Human-AI Co-Creative Systems (2022, background): “Sawyer asserted that the creativity that emerges from collaboration is diferent from the creativity emerging from an individual where interaction among the group is a vital component of creativity [137].”
Theoretical and Pedagogical Perspectives on Orchestrating Creativity and Collaborative Learning. (2011, background): “The roots of the of creativity research concern the psychological origin of individual creativity (see Sawyer, 2006b; Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009).”
Rewriting the Language of Creativity: The Five A's Framework (2013, background): “Moreover, the notion of “distributed creativity” emerged in the work of several scholars (see Miettinen, 2006; Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009), although it was concerned more with social factors rather than the relation between actors and a material, physical environment.”
Extending Sociocultural Theory to Group Creativity (2012, background): “The following case study of collaborative emergence is taken from an extended study of a student improvisational theatre group, TheatreWorks (Sawyer and DeZutter 2009).”
Imagination and Creativity in Organizations (2018, background): “This allows me to elaborate on the ways in which creative thinking, one’s imagining and images, only make sense in terms of the way they are expressed, absorbed and elaborated on by others (Glǎveanu, 2014; Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009).”
Co-teaching as a context for teachers' professional learning and joint knowledge construction (2012, background): “The learning processes presented here reflect two levels of collaborative emergence (Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009): on the first level were Matt and Lisa’s immediate pedagogical innovations.”
The Social Brain, Language, and Goal-Directed Collective Thinking: A Social Conception of Cognition and Its Implications for Understanding How We Think, Teach, and Learn (2013, background): “Several studies take a sociocultural theoretical perspective, in which culturally framed ways of communicating and the use of cultural tools are considered important (Miell & Littleton, 2004; Paulus & Nijstad, 2003; Sawyer, 2012; Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009).”