Towards the “Digital Creativity of Action”

Abstract

This chapter seeks to explore the interrelationship between creativity, technology, and social practices. How we shape and transform our practices in a rapidly changing and intensely complex world requires continual exploration. The ways in which not only creativity—but digital creativity—is contributing to the transformation of these practices is the basis of this argument. Such a conceptualization builds upon an Australian-based empirical study of the ways in which students, academics, and professionals conceptualize creativity. A phenomenographic outcome space, which stemmed from this study, categorized the qualitatively different ways participants conceptualized creativity. A synthesis of these findings with a corresponding interdisciplinary literature review suggest the ways in which social practices interplay with digital technologies—leading to the expansion of digital creativity. Technologies are significantly expanding the ways in which we interact, communicate and learn; how these changes correspond to changes in the ways we conceptualize creativity requires further examination. The novel actions associated with technology are not only expressions of creativity—they compose the “digital creativity of action.” Complexity theory provides a multidimensional lens to analyze the diversity and nuances of how digital creativity is embodied in our social practices. This associates to the multimodal ways in which we now can enact and express our social practices. Also emerging through digital creativity is learning which is lifewide; this involves the expanding spectrum of formal and informal learning across both individual and collective spheres. The purpose of this chapter is to explore how digital creativity is transforming our practices; that is, what we know, how we act and who we are becoming. It is this continuum—the interrelationship between the creativity of action and the digital—which is reconfiguring social practices in new and critical ways.