Between the Psychology of Creative Processes and the Dynamics of Innovation in Culture: Semiotic Challenges in the Modeling of Creativity

Abstract

Historically the concept of creativity has been used in psychological studies as a way of understanding the emergence of the new in the relationship between individual and culture. Traditionally, it has been associated with an excessively individual or exclusively cultural origin. From the perspective of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics, this concept is thought of in its relational character, dependent on the interaction between culture and subjectivity, focusing on the various forms of emergence of the novelty in the world. The emergence of the novelty would be conceived in this perspective as marked by semiotic mediation, by the dialogism implied in the very constitution of the self via the I-other relationship and by the temporal and historical singularity of the agents involved in the creative process. In these contours, the psychology of creativity comes into contact and tension with the so-called innovation culture, which, although it seeks to account for the production of the new artifacts, has a grammar more focused on understanding the uses and diffusion of innovation in society. The concepts then seem to approximate in a way that can be thought almost synonymous. It is understanding innovation as a divergent notion of creativity – that is, as a non-antagonistic opposition – that we want to generate the necessary contrast for a reflection on the challenges of modeling the creative process. Analyzing the zone of stability between creativity and innovation, exploring temporality and otherness as analytical axes seems to be an important exercise for the delimitation and critical reflection of these notions and their resonances.