Software tools that support creativity have traditionally been designed primarily for small teams of professionals. However, with the rise of the Internet and inexpensive computer systems, the use of these tools is leading to new creative collaborations, where creative activity is distributed not across a small team of professionals as in the past, but rather across tens of thousands of people around the globe, many of whom are non-professionals. In this research, the investigators reconstruct the history of two such massive collaborations--one involving short movies about video games and the other involving a massive online crafting community--to understand how their phenomenal success evolved.
There is considerable interest in the scientific community in such large-scale collaborations. Many research problems today involve massive data sets and computational power. Solving these problems requires the collaboration of thousands of researchers around the world, rather than collaboration among the members of a small team in a lab. The online communities the investigators are studying have found ways to distribute their productivity on a massive scale and found success with it. This research seeks to understand and model that success. Such a model could lead to the design of software tools to support massive creative collaboration, e.g., in the sciences, as well as helping to clarify the organizational and communications environments needed to support them.
This grant project was funded by the NSF CreativeIT grant program, which is devoted to research that supports and extends human creativity and problem solving. Scientists, humanists, and artists have studied creativity for over a century, informing the design of educational curricula, business organizations, professional tools, and other creativity supports. Creativity is valued because it is linked to economic growth, through innovation that creates jobs and opportunities. Creativity is also valued because of its connections to high quality of life, self-expression, and activities that people find meaningful. Most creativity research, however, has been based in twentieth-century organizations—schools and workplaces especially—which were often organized around individuals or small teams of collaborators working on well defined problems (e.g., how to improve patient diagnoses, how to market a new product, or how to teach children history). In the past few decades, we have witnessed a sudden rise in computing, the Internet, and social media. Within social media sites like Facebook, Etsy, World of Warcraft, Flickr, and Pinterest one finds literally tens or hundreds of millions of people using a single system to socialize, express themselves, play, and share. Each of these sites supports massive-scale creative endeavors, but these are not organized or led in the same ways that traditional organizations, like schools and workplaces, have been. Massive scale creative networks raise questions. Do traditional theories and models of creativity apply to these places? Are there creative practices, skills, or outcomes that as a society we’re overlooking because these sites are so different from what we’re used to? As these technologies become part of everyday life, can we be confident that business and government investments in creativity—in education, infrastructure, tools, organizational policies, etc.—reflect these emerging forms of creativity? This grant project was designed to contribute new research to answer questions like these. We chose a handful of communities, all massive in scale, globally-distributed, amateur-driven, and yet doing work that its users find of value. They are World of Warcraft, an online game at one point boasting over 13 million players; Etsy, an e-commerce site specializing in hand-crafts; and maker groups, often smaller groups participating in a loosely connected but truly expansive worldwide network devoted to repairing technologies and appliances, (legally) "hacking" technologies to extend their capabilities, innovating with new materials (e.g., 3D printers), and DIY projects. Many experts believe that sites like these provide a glimpse into the future of computing, leading us to ask: What are the "best" activities or outcomes in sites like these? What can today’s business, government, and educational organizations learn about creativity from them? What is the future workforce going to be good at, what skills will they bring, and what will they want to do with those skills? In our four-year study of these sites, we specifically sought to understand creative practices: What do people do? With what tools or other supports? With what skills? With whom did they collaborate? How did they coordinate their efforts? Who were their leaders, and what does "leadership" mean in such communities? We also sought to understand their creative outcomes: What did they make? Which creative objects were especially successful or influential? How did those objects comment on or speak to contemporary society and culture? What did they say or mean? Our research found strong evidence of creative outcomes from these communities, including innovations in technology design and use, storytelling, social practices of creativity, the blending of physical and computational materials, and even law/policy. We found evidence that these creative outcomes in many cases improved in quality over time, providing insights into the technical, educational, and aesthetic infrastructures that supported this improvement, with implications for education and organizational informatics. We found evidence of ways that existing technologies both hindered and helped these creative practices, and specifically ways that older assumptions of creativity are influencing the design of creativity support technologies, with implications for new creativity support design strategies. We found that the body of scientific theories of creativity remains overall relevant and useful, and that our results mainly suggest some refinements and new directions worth investigating. We found both barriers and potential entrypoints for historically underrepresented groups, including women and minorities, within these communities, with implications for improving the diversity of engagement in STEM topics and practices.
