Beyond Binary Choices: Understanding and Exploiting Trade-Offs to Enhance Creativity

Prof. Gerhard Fischer

Center for Lifelong Learning and Design, University of Colorado

Fri Dec 16 10:00:00 NZDT 2005 in Room 031, MSCS

Abstract

Many research approaches are conceptualized as binary choices, representing endpoints of a spectrum (each of them providing important perspectives within their own discourses). Design and creativity are often conceptualized as being focused on one of these binary choices, thereby overlooking other possibilities. To better stimulate, enhance, and support creativity, our research has explored the middle ground between the endpoints defined by binary choices to identify "sweet spots" based on a careful trade-off analysis of specific goals, objectives, stakeholders, and socio-technical environments.

The presentation will illustrate some of the major trade-offs related to design and creativity that we have explored in our research over the last ten years, including prescriptive and permissive environments, individual and social creativity, communities of practice and communities of interest, and consumer and active contributor cultures. It will briefly describe some of the socio-technical environments that we have developed to enhance creativity in specific contexts.

Biography

Gerhard Fischer is a Professor of Computer Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, and the Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design (L3D) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research is focused on new conceptual frameworks and new media for learning, working, and collaboration; human-computer interaction; cognitive science; distributed intelligence; social creativity; design; meta-design; domain-oriented design environments; and universal design (assistive technologies).. Over the last twenty years, he has directed research projects and has published extensively in these areas.