Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts
BUY NOW on Amazon: Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts
LISTEN to the interview Dave and Helen Edwards did with me (June 2024) as part of the Artificiality podcast series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHwpWPl92o0
In Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts I describe how creativity happens in rich, large-scale contexts that require guidance. I describe the roles of guiding conceptions and guiding principles in the creative process. Context is described formally as a network and I present a two-step core creative model. The book also includes rich case studies that illustrate the framework.
Guiding conceptions provide a vision for where to look and what kinds of connections to look for in the rich context. Guiding principles evaluate possibilities and provide the spark to locate the crucial “missing piece” to make a project come together. The framework describes how individuals use these two forms of guidance to create. Examples include Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Indigenous Australian artist Clifford Possum, engineer and transgender activist Lynn Conway, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and many others.
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Creativity in Large-Scale Contexts takes a crucial step in the direction of modeling individuality in social and cultural systems. I look forward to going even further in pursuit of this important vision.
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Watch Professor Feinstein's talk "Creativity & Complexity" at IMCIC : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGHJ4jXolyY . He discusses individual creative development, and modeling the creative development of fields.
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Read Professor Feinstein's blog on Creative Development for the Tory Burch Foundation: www.toryburchfoundation.org
/resources/expert-advice/a-guide-to-creative-development/
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Jonathan Feinstein studies creativity, especially how it emerges out of paths of learning, engagement, and development. While it is common to focus on the moment of inspiration as the essence of creativity, he takes a more encompassing and organic approach, studying how creativity and innovation are generated through an unfolding process.
Professor Feinstein is committed to nurturing true creative development in educational and professional settings. His class Creativity & Innovation is a longstanding favorite at Yale and has been featured in several media stories. He also leads workshops on creativity. His approach blends lecture with many creativity exercises and sharing.
Professor Feinstein also studies the creative development of fields. Every individual/team is unique in its path of development, yet they all interrelate to propel the field forward. Related is his view that many creative links go unrecognized and unappreciated: In the winding path of a person's creative development there are many influences that are not evident in that person's ultimate creative work but were essential to its creation. So many important links are lost from the historical record, biasing our view of the true creative process. The biases may also be systematic, tending to enhance the apparent influence of a few and reduce our appreciation of the influences of the many. Currently at work on a project with several RA’s investigating references dropped and added as papers are developed from working papers to final publication. Preliminary results show that approximately one-fifth of all references in working papers are dropped in the published version.
Beyond his work on creativity, Professor Feinstein is an expert in tax compliance, detection, and models of auditing and compliance. His contributions in this area include the econometric model detection controlled estimation, which has had considerable practical application, game theory models of compliance and auditing, and a widely cited review of the tax compliance field. He is also the author of a well known review of the relationship between socioeconomic status and health.
My first book explores creative development unfolding over time. It includes many examples of famous creators such as Albert Einstein, Virginia Woolf, Charles Darwin, Henri Matisse, William Faulkner, Hannah Arendt, and John Maynard Keynes. It also includes rich details about the creative process for individuals who earned advanced degrees in literature, neuroscience, and mathematics, based on extensive interviews.
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Related Papers:
The Creative Development of Fields: Learning, Creativity, Paths, Implications is published in the Journal of the Knowledge Economy, 2017. In the paper I construct a model of the creative development of a field through the series of creative contributions individuals make. It links economics with the field of knowledge representation.
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Diversity, knowledge clusters, and job placement: Graduate economics teaching of core Microeconomics (with Arthur Campbell, Soonwok Hong, Sharon Qian, and Trevor Williams), The Journal of Economic Education, 2017.