Outsight Phenomenology and Creativity through Making

This event is part of a series of Psychology seminars that regularly occurs during the Autumn and Spring terms.

A cognitivist narrative on the nature of creativity is steeped in exceptionalism: people with exceptional cognitive capacities and skills are simply more adept at solving problems and generating original ideas.

It is from this exceptionalist perspective that commentators offer a distinction between so called Big-Creativity of breakthroughs and little-creativity displayed in more pedestrian activities. From this perspective, interventions to enhance creativity aim to improve people’s cognitive abilities. These abilities are measured through standardized tests of divergent and convergent thinking, and the logic of such measurement practices in turn validate—and perform—the exceptionalist agenda.

In contrast, a post-cognitivist perspective casts creative problem solving as a situated, enacted and interactive process. Here the emphasis is not so much on ideation before engaging with a problem, or on ways to promote more creative ideation, but rather on the material engagement with the elements that configure a problem.

Laboratory methodologies designed to foster this form of interactive engagement are better placed to reveal how novel ideas emerge through a recursive cycle of making and observing. Participants are transformed as they transform physical solution prototypes; we witness a double process of becoming. While the term ‘insight’ is often employed (anecdotally and in more controlled laboratory conditions), a more appropriate term might be ‘outsight’, that is people see in the world the results of their engagement. The positive phenomenology of insight (relief and pleasure) also accompanies moments of outsight.