Chance and Interactivity Stimulate Creativity

To study the value of interactivity and chance in creative cognition we looked at the creative process in architecture, choreography and word discovery. Seventeen architects and novice students were given a set of blocks and asked to design their dream house. Although the blocks seem simple they are filled with perceptual surprises. Manipulation led to seeing new things and these in turn led to thinking up new structural forms. In choreography we studied the creative method of a noted choreographer and observed how random objects in the environment often figure in tasks he assigned his dancers. The dancers would look for interesting attributes in the objects that they then played off of in interesting ways. In a word discovery task we gave subjects a string of 7 letters and asked them to call out all the words of three or more letters they could make. They were tested in three conditions: static letters are fixed, interactiveletters can be moved, and shuffle spacebar randomly reorders the letters. Subjects scored best on Shuffle followed by Interactive and then Static. The element common to all these creative methods is that changes to the local environment lead subjects to notice aspects of the scene in new and interesting ways. This perceptual variety facilitates creativity.