Dear All,
The conversation on creativity includes several sets of issues that may be more vexed than they seem at first.
It is not always clear to me that creativity is (or is not) opposed to the conventional wisdom of the community. That very much depends on the community.
In science or mathematics, progress often takes place when someone finds a way to think around what has been done, and to think in new ways. In some cases, those new thinkers build very clearly on the work of their predecessors, listening to their elders as it were. In other cases, only by ignoring or neglecting elders and conventional wisdom does progress occur.
Albert Einstein mastered the physics that preceded his work and went beyond it to build the new physics. Ignatz Semmelweiss had to reject the guild thinking and wisdom of his elders to identify and work toward hygienic medical practice at a time when conventional wisdom was that physicians were gentleman practititioners, clean by definition, who performed surgery in street clothes and who did not wash their hands between patients.
It seems to me that there may be knowledge traditions or ways of knowing in which communities talk things through to think in creative ways. In such communities, learning from one's elders makes sense for collaborative cognition. In other cases, that's exactly what not to do.
If one traces the development of predatory capitalism leading up to and culminating in the astonishing excesses of recent years, many of the ideological foundations and most of the legal and financial techniques that bring us to our current state emerged from a form of collaborative cognition within governmental, legal, and financial circles, along with collaborative cognition within certain powerful institutions that supported and served the ideologies of the time, including universities, think tanks, and foundations.
In economics for the public good, there was a time when a thinker such as Paul Krugman was simply a lone voice explaining patiently why forces in motion were going to unravel -- destroying, as they did so, much of the world's wealth. In this case, of course, the purposeful engineering of a situation that would shrink and hamper sovereign governments and government agencies would also destroy much of the world's ability to respond constructively to the crises. While this is not the kind of design situation that most of us get to address, it was indeed a design problem in the specific sense of Herbert Simon's definition. Quite clearly, the community and elders of Wall Street, the US Congress, the US federal government, and what C Wright Mills would have called the power elite got it wrong, at least on economics, as did the Thatcherites and Reaganauts did to a lesser and far more nuanced degree. (Please friends -- I know it is contentious to suggest that Lady Thatcher was nuanced, but on some issues she was, and she was certainly so compared to the Bushies. And nothing in the Reagan years compared to what took place in the Bush-Cheney regime, even with the Iran-Contra scandals.)
This is a deliberate large-scale example because this kind of context is what so often establishes the conventional wisdom within which communities do their collaborative thinking. And that is precisely why so many examples of creativity must be understood and thought through on a case-by-case basis, usually when we're in the middle of the case. That is why Kierkegaard so famously wrote that life must be lived forward while we can only understand it backward.
In a well-known eulogy from another era entirely, Winston Churchill spoke these words: "It is not given to human beings ... to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days."
This is the problem that anyone faces in trying to move forward from our position embedded in time and community values. Churchill spoke on the scale of macro-history. A Dean Kamen deals on a far different scale with the Segway -- but right or wrong, one may well ask whether his idea was really so bad. In a nation dominated by motor cars, built for motor cars, and legally orchestrated, planned, and zoned around privately owned motor cars, one wonders whether -- or how -- Kamen might have done otherwise. That's the old question that the build-it-in-a-garage computer companies faced back when a computer was a mainframe in a world ruled by IBM and DEC. Kamen tried to get around a near-monopoly culture in nation where only fifty years ago, automobile manufacturers successfully conspired to buy up and rip out many of North America's excellent, well functioning light urban railway systems to replace them with buses and automobiles.
Even so humble an effort as the Segway finds itself up against massive problems in a nation dominated by automobiles. To launch the Segway -- or a Segway-like invention -- through collaborative cognition requires understanding and unraveling a systemic range of behaviors and laws wrapped around and embedded in the infrastructures built for an entirely different way of being.
Consider Kamen's current project. We live in a world where a handful of large-scale monopolies are working to own and control the world's water rights as though water were a commodity and not a human right. Kamen has created a water purification system purposely intended to enable people to gain access to pure water in a responsible, affordable way. Whether this is a perfect solution or the best solution is another question -- but it's easy to see that the water lords will not like a product that disrupts their infrastructure control.
Without comparing Dean Kamen to Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi in degree, we can compare Kamen to them in kind. He is trying to articulate a similar kind of revolutionary philosophy by giving basic transport or basic water rights to a larger range of people than now have them. I see the problem of calling for a different kind of world in an environment dominated by corporations that purposely do not want people to think or to work in such ways. In this context, these corporations have come to dominate the communities that shape laws, zoning ordinances, water districts, streets and sidewalks, water purification systems, water access codes, and the like. In such communities, collaborative cognition will always be constrained.
Is Kamen an egomaniac who refuses to listen and learn? Perhaps. One might have said the same of King or Gandhi, and at different times, many did. There are few perfect answers.
On a distinctly different but possibly related note, James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies is now saying that his new calculations show that we are already past the point of no return on the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide that will trigger catastrophic climate change. The possibly good news in this scenario is that it is still possible through drastic action to reverse the trend enough to bring us back down to a potentially survivable situation. What kind of approach should Hansen adopt to bring about the wide public acceptance of his scientific findings -- and the kinds of public policies we need for a world in which human beings and other life forms can survive?
It seems to me that the context of current cultures and the social technologies in which our cultures are embedded make this question and other questions like it far thornier than a Hansen or anyone else can navigate. A socially enabled and embedded creativity of collaborative cognition would probably be the way forward -- the challenge is how to get there.
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean
Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
Telephone +61 3 9214 6755
www.swinburne.edu.au/design
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