Summary:

When and how do people fully demonstrate one’s creativity? In this paper, we would like to propose a new way to view creativity as an emergent process and illustrate it with an example from many workshops we have organized.

According to Dweck (2006), a person learns better when s/he views oneself as not someone with a fixed set of abilities but as someone whose potential can be expanded by her/his own actions. We would like to extend this concept and argue that it is useful to view creativity as an emergent process in which people and objects interact with each other to discover new meanings rather than as an ability of a person. We have created many workshops as environments in which one can view oneself, other people and objects as flexible and expandable, focusing on their potentials and possibilities, on what they can be, rather than what they are. Experience in such an environment would stimulate what we have called “playful spirit” which tries to connect oneself, other people, space and objects, in order to find new meanings in any situation.

Our interest is in how to design learning environments that foster such a playful spirit. In this paper, we will present an example of our innovative workshop “Learning Art 2005” where we attempted to expose the participants to a creative process as an emergent, constructive and relational play.