Dear Alan

Thanks for the conundrum - it helps takes the question to interesting places.

the examples you raise have another kind of "cuteness" - by which I do not imply any lack of real concern. Architecture is given a privildige that needs exposing and investigation. Papaneck, for example, will not allow that we could design transcendental refigerators - but yet we can design transcendental spaces/buildings.

Reader-response theory can help here - we tend to remain very quite about most of our sensory knowledge - it is a freedom that even the fascist is reluctant to constrain. Nonetheless we establsih horizons of expectation and communities of interpretation that the  allow for disruptions that we can then see as novel if not creative.

These issues, from the point of the maker/designer are covered very well in the work o

 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ********Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Harper Collins, New York, 1996.
**
Winnicott's transitional object also helps us understand that as individuals and groups, we can allow subject-objects that retain special status in our object relations. Buildings and spaces afford a common ground for such common special subject-objects.

Lots more great material in these questions -

all the best

keith russell
OZ newcastle

>>> Alan Murdock <[log in to unmask]> 09/20/03 04:26 AM >>>
Dear Keith,

I don't think anyone on this list is encouraging cute observations about objects, but I agree with your criticism of transactionalism.  One of my largest conundrums is how to apply this form of thought without coming off as some form of techno ecstatic who places feeling or experience before analytical research.  

In terms of transactionalism, though I think there are some important possibilities in relation to creativity.  I often give my students the concept of a hallway, a room and a stairwell.  I ask them to consider what each is for, how each is used, and socially appropriate behaviors in each area.  Then they consider which is private and which public.  Sheetrock, cement and steel are relatively simple technologies, but they have the ability to act on us through their form.  We then talk about ways of altering action in a given space that leads toward performance theory and ways of altering the space to change the kind of interaction that occurs there.  Examples like the Telanor building in Oslo or Vito Acconci's Island in the Mur are interesting examples of altering space for the purpose of altering human interactions.

So the question is still there - does this kind of mediation of space show examples of "creativity"?  For me, upon close inspection, creativity dissolves into other things such as discipline, knowledge and skill.  Thus the creative leap is less important as a subject than the larger process that surrounds what is perceived as a creative leap.  When people focus on the moment of the creative leap they end up ruminating in as mystical a fashion as with your example of the breathing imac.

Am I misinterpreting the intended goals of a study on creativity?  

Best,
Alan Murdock
The Art Institute of Portland


Dear Ricardo

I don't mind the questions - but for me, none of these "objects" rates the term "creativity".

Can artefacts be said to evidence, of themself, creativity? This is a similar issue to the long running issue on this list about whether artefacts can be research.

I am confident that it is possible to offer accounts that justify our desire to claim creativity or research knowledge of artefacts.

I resist offering the account because it is too easily taken up by people who do not understand the argument but want the result.

I don't mind all the transactional psychology - indeed the general absence of design psychology is one of the biggest scandals of design practice/research.

However, a much more sophisticated account of the status of the object  as a mode of mediation needs to be offered. While object-relations psychology can take us deeper into this than transactional psychology, we end up in some warm Italian kitchen with Allessi rather than in a world of cute observations about iMacs as if they drew breath.

Now that might start a few fires in the belly of the designer?

creatively
keith russell
OZ newcastle