Action-based Creativity #1 The Pinwheel Framework

Last summer I had my first Carnival cruise trip with my family. It was a wonderful experience. Everyday they made a towel animal and put it on our bed as a surprise. My sons really liked it. Finally, they organized a program to teach us how to fold it. This was one of the amazing things I learned from the trip. According to Wikipedia, “The exact originator of towel animals is unknown, but their popularity is often attributed to Carnival Cruise Lines.”

Recently several friends asked me a critical question about CALL (Creative Action Learning Lab):

What’s Creative Action?

In the beginning, I didn’t have a good idea to reply. I thought it was just a name for my new journey which focuses on action-based creative activities. So, I always replied to them with the above towel animal story.

Folding towels into animals is a creative action.

Each time, I reflected on the name and the story. Finally, I got an ideal answer to this question.

Now I want to turn the name into a theoretical term. I coined a new term “Action-based Creativity” and created the below framework with “Creative Action” as its core.

The above pinwheel diagram shows seven dimensions of Action-based Creativity and seven Creative Triggers. The seven creative triggers are placed as wings and the seven dimensions are placed at the edge of wings. Each creative trigger connects to a dimension of creative action.

Seven dimensions of Action-based Creativity are Mind, Culture, Emotion, Relationship, Tool, Social Role, and Environment. Seven Creative Triggers are Creative Models, Creative Themes, Creative Narrative, Creative Engagement, Creative Things, Creative Personas, and Creative Spaces.

The connection between these dimensions and triggers is called Creative Impact Path. The below examples are typical seven impact paths:

1. Creative Models → (impact) → Mind
2. Creative Themes → (impact) → Culture
3. Creative Narrative → (impact) → Emotion
4. Creative Engagement → (impact) → Relationship
5. Creative Things → (impact) → Tool
6. Creative Personas → (impact) → Social Role
7. Creative Spaces → (impact) → Environment

This framework is not a scientific theory, but for CALL’s practical purpose. In the future, I will use this framework to plan programs for CALL.

How did this framework come? First, I started from the definition of Action. Next, I categorized three types of activity and found related seven dimensions. Last, I identified seven types of creative trigger which can impact these dimensions.

Action: Do Something

It is very hard to give a perfect definition to simple but important concepts such as “Action” which is the core of “Practice theory”, “Behavior psychology”, “Sociology”, “Activity Theory” and many more academic disciplines. For example, Activity Theory, which originates from the socio-cultural tradition in Russian psychology, developed a hierarchical structure of activity. See the below diagram:

From the perspective of Activity Theory, the “Action” is part of the high level concept “Activity” and each Action is a conscious process directed at “Goals”. Activity Theory is an established strong theoretical tradition. I have learned it during last the three years and tried to apply it to my design research projects. Unfortunately, I didn’t make any exciting achievements. So, I moved to other traditions and I found Ecological Psychology.

What’s the reason behind my struggle with Activity Theory? Why do I feel comfortable with Ecological Psychology? First, Activity Theory’s “Action” ties to “Goals”. For me, this makes a limitation for exploring creativity. Conversely, Ecological psychologists differentiates between “Exploratory action” and “Performatory action”. The former does not require goals while the latter does.

Second, Activity Theory doesn’t have a concept like “Affordance” which is coined by Ecological psychologist James J. Gibson. According to Gibson, “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. ” The idea of Affordance changed my mind about “Action” and I believe it is a powerful thinking-tool for people who care about creativity and innovation.

For the reason of saving time, I just give it a very short description to Action: Action means doing something. It can be guided with goal and intent or without it. Also, it can be guided by affordances or not. Inspired by the hierarchical structure of activity theory, I also set a similar structure:

Act → Action → Activity

Based on my definition of Action, Act means a step of doing something. Also, we can say Activity means a set of Actions.

Action-based Creativity

Traditionally, researchers of creativity use the term “4P” to describe the landscape of creativity study. The 4P stands for person, process, product, and press. This framework originally proposed by Rhodes in 1961 and became very popular for overviewing the academic discipline. Since the rise of sociocultural and ecological psychology as well as theories of the distributed mind, some scholars challenged this framework.

In 2013, Vlad Petre Glaveanu proposed a more systemic, contextual, and dynamic approach called 5A framework in his paper: Rewriting the Language of Creativity: The Five A’s Framework. The author said, “this is more than a change of terminology but a fundamental change of epistemological position. In light of sociocultural sources, the actor exists only in relation to an audience, action cannot take place outside of interactions with a social and material world, and artifacts embody the cultural traditions of different communities”.

I called this switch from 4P to 5A as The Action Turn in Creativity research. The 5A framework might be the first one which pays attention to the legacy of ecological psychology: Affordance. This is why I chose this 5A framework as my starting point.

The 5A framework still pays attention to the creative process, but I pay attention to the creative creation or creative outcomes. I call my approach as Action-based creativity.

Three types of Activity

Once we have built a foundation for discussing Creative Actions, the next step is building a typology. In 2014, Activity Theorist Clay Spinuzzi published a paper titled Toward a Typology of Activities: Understanding Internal Contradictions in Multiperspectival Activities. He pointed out, “AT (Activity Theory) currently lacks a suitable typology for characterizing ideal types of activities in terms of multiperspectivity, so it has had trouble systematically characterizing the resulting sets of internal contradictions.”

In the article, Clay followed the tradition of Activity Theory and focused on “object” which is a core concept of Activity Theory. He asked two questions about “object”: how is the object defined (tacitly or explicitly)? where is the object defined (internally or externally)? Based on these two questions, Clay proposed a typology of activities and identified four types of activity: Clans, Networks, Hierarchies and Markets.

A Typology of activities (Clay Spinuzzi, 2014)

Clay’s typology is very useful for applying Activity Theory to the management field. In 2017, I found his typology is hard to apply to other fields. Thus, I developed a different typology of activity. Instead of focusing on object, I focused on “actor” and asked one question: how does the actor act? Originally, I found five typical types of actions: Think, Say, Make, Play and Curate.

For exploring Creative Action, now I re-organize these five categories and reduce them to three types:

Think: Epistemic activity

This category combines the original Think and Curate. It covers learning, thinking, curating, and more epistemic activities.

Social: Interpersonal activity

This category presents the original Say. I changed the name from Say to Social and expanded it to all interpersonal activities.

Body: Embodied activity

This category combines the original Make and Play and expands to all body related activities.

Seven dimensions of Action-based Creativity

Based on the above typology, I asked the following question:

For a particular type of activity, what are the key factors affecting it?

I found there are seven key factors. I called them as seven dimensions of Action-based Creativity. My answer is not accurate, but more intuitive. The result was the following diagram.

For “Think (epistemic activity)”, “Culture” and “Mind” are two key factors. For “Social (interpersonal activity)”, “Relationship”, “Emotion” and “Social Role” are three important factors. For “Body (embodied activity)”, “Tool” and “Environment” are critical factors.

So, where is “Language”? Since this is a framework about “Action”, I do not pay attention to “Language, Information, Content, Media…”. I just give a room called “Culture” which can contain all of these things.

Seven types of Creative Triggers

The third step is finding creative triggers which can impact seven dimensions. There are many creative triggers, following the Miller’s law, I select seven typical creative triggers.

1. Creative Models
2. Creative Themes
3. Creative Narrative
4. Creative Engagement
5. Creative Things
6. Creative Personas
7. Creative Spaces

Creative Models

Creative Models are theoretical models, frameworks, formulas, diagrams, etc. It changes people’s mind and impacts their epistemic activity. For example, If you apply BJ Fogg’s Fogg Behavior Model to your life, you can change your habits. If you want to understand everyday optimal experience, you can check Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow model.

Creative Themes

Creative Themes are actionable culture themes. Creative Themes change existing culture and impact people’s epistemic activity. For example, “Try something new for 30 days” is a creative theme initiated by Matt Cuts. Many people followed this theme and took real actions. Matt didn’t point to a particular type of action, instead suggesting a theme.

What I Learned When I Tried Something New For 30 Days

“Before I die I want to…”, a public art made by artist and TED Fellow Candy Chang, is very popular within the global TEDx community. Many local TEDx curators made the “Before I die I want to…” giant chalkboard in their venues.

Creative Narrative

Narrative is not only about storytelling, but also experience sharing and emotional empathy. Creative narrative are novel approaches of storytelling, saying and listening. For example, StoryCorps, an archive of interviews between everyday people, won the 2015 TED Prize. StoryWorth created a new way for family narrative.

Creative Engagement

Engagement is about building optimal social experience within interpersonal interactions. Creative Engagement shapes human connections and social relationships in unconventional ways. For example, icebreaking is a key process for social event design, if you want to know how to take this challenge, here are 62 Ice Breaker Ideas for a More Engaged Event.

A popular online creative engagement example is AMA (Ask Me Anything) which is a public question-and-answer interactive interview. Originally born in Reddit.com, AMA has gone on to become a standard format for curating online community programs.

LIVE schedule

Another online creative engagement example is Twichat. Though Twitter doesn’t have an official feature for live tweeting, some Twitter users use hashtag feature to curate live Twichat events. If you are working in education related fields, here are 40 education Twitter chats worth your time.

Creative Things

Creative Things are brand new tools, artifacts, objects, instruments, etc. These things change the way we interact with the world. Activity Theorists called this effort “mediation” which means tools are a bride between human (as subject) and the world (as object).

For example, Wilson Tennis Ball Pick Up Hopper does not only contain tennis balls, but it can help people pick them up easily. Some creative things provide us functional benefits, other creative things just give emotional surprise such as two things I mentioned in the above tweet.

Creative Personas

Personas is a design and marketing term, it means “a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way”. I use this term in a wide sense and connect it to sociological term social role which means “a set of connected behaviors, rights, obligations, beliefs, and norms as conceptualized by people in a social situation.” While social roles may have a given individual social status or social position, creative personas do not have to tie to these social aspects.

In 2010, Leroy Stick created a Twitter account @BPGlobalPR and satirized BP’s statements to the public, giving a way for those frustrated by the oil spill to vent their anger with humor. On June 28, 2010, he was invited to give a speech on TEDxOilSpill event. TED called him a pseudonymous humorist which can be seen as a creative persona.

Creative Spaces

Creative Spaces can be physical environments such as a museum, digital environments such as a website, or social environments such as a TEDx event or a competition program. Creative Spaces provide new opportunities that normal spaces don’t offer.

For example, Dialogue in the Dark provides people a totally dark environment where blind guides lead people to interact with dark ambient settings without using visual sense. TEDx, an open brand program launched by TED, provided creative spaces for local TED enthusiasts. Each local TEDx event attracts various backgrounds but ambitious young social changemakers and forms a pull-based social space for them.

Create Impact Path

There are many impact paths between seven creative triggers and seven dimensions. One creative trigger can impact one dimension or more dimensions, two or more creative triggers can impact the same one dimension.

The below examples are seven typical creative impact paths:

1. Creative Models → (impact) → Mind
2. Creative Themes → (impact) → Culture
3. Creative Narrative → (impact) → Emotion
4. Creative Engagement → (impact) → Relationship
5. Creative Things → (impact) → Tool
6. Creative Personas → (impact) → Social Role
7. Creative Spaces > → (impact) → Environment

A simple impact path includes two-step impacts. First, a creative trigger impacts a key factor, then the key factor impacts creative action. For example, “creative engagement” is a creative trigger which impacts “Relationship” which is a key factor of action.

Beyond simple paths, there are more complex versions of creative paths. Several creative triggers can lead to one key factor, or one creative trigger can lead to more than one key factors.

Case Study

In 2004, Clayton M. Christensen and Paul R. Carlile wrote a paper about theory building in Management Research: The Cycles of Theory Building in Management Research. They suggested two stages of theory building: the descriptive stage and the normative stage.

At the first stage, researchers find a conceptual insight from observing phenomena and design a typology by making classification, finally they define the relationships between categories and form a model. At the second stage, researchers need to collect more data to test the model and confirm the causality. If they pass the anomaly test, the outcome will be a new version of theory: the normative theory.

Following this path, I’d like to say the existing Pinwheel Framework is a descriptive framework. What I need to do at the next stage is collecting more data and using data to test this framework. That means I need to do more case studies.

In the age of social videos, we can collect as many creative action cases as we want. I hope we can take this challenge together in the future.

Theories as Lens

As I mentioned above, “Action” is the core of “Practice theory”, “Behavior psychology”, “Sociology”, “Activity Theory” and many more academic disciplines. There are various established theory traditions. For example:

1. Activity Theory (Alexei Leont’ev, 1978)
2. Affordance Theory (James J. Gibson, 1966/1979)
3. Symbolic Interactionism (Herbert Blumer, 1969)
4. Behavior Settings Theory (Roger Barker, 1968)
5. Actor-network Theory (Bruno Latour, 1979)
6. Culture as Toolkit Theory (Ann Swidler, 1986)
7. Communities of Practice (Etienne Wenger-Trayner, 1999)
8. Identity Theory (Peter J. Burke and Jan E. Stets, 2009)
9. Flow Theory (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1975)
10. Conceptual Blending Theory (Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, 2002)

The above and other theories can be used as lens for understanding seven types of creative triggers. There is no one theory that can explain so many different things. The more theories you know, the more deep understanding you can make.

CALL for Action

Some people like developing frameworks and models as thinking tools for directly solving problems, I do like developing frameworks and models as thinking containers for curating practice experience, theoretical knowledge, and peer-to-peer conversation together.

The Action-based Creativity is the first creative container presented by CALL (Creative Action Learning Lab). I wish you could enjoy the intellectual journey with me.

I need 21 people to join this experiment with me. Each 3 people will form a tiny group for one creative trigger. Each tiny group’s goal is growing its scale to a 21-people group. Together, we will build a small community with 148 members for Action-based Creativity.

I called this plan as #CALL3721.

If you want to join this experiment with me, here are three things you can do.

1. Use hashtag #CALL3721 to share your ideas on Twitter.
2. Pick one creative trigger, become the founder of a tiny group.
3. Follow Action-based Creativity learning challenge channel on Doowit (Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of Doowit).

Each creative trigger group is a learning group. We can collect related cases, learn related theories and have various discussions.