Abstract
Computational creativity is not limited to the study of human-like creativity and forces us to think about creativity as a general process that can be applied wherever new things come into existence. In this chapter I propose that in order to unify various forms of creativity it is necessary to consider a distinction between two types of creativity: generative creativity, in which things are created as the result of a process regardless of their value, and adaptive creativity, in which things are created as adaptive responses by a system to its situation. Whilst individual human creativity is typically of the adaptive form, collectively humans are engaged in processes of generative creativity as well as adaptive creativity. It is helpful to understand human creative behaviour as part of a social process involving these two aspects, and this is relevant to understanding how manmade artefacts can act as creative agents in social networks.
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Notes
- 1.
Discussions on this topic can be found in the chapters by Cariani (Chap. 15) and McCormack (Chap. 2) in this book, in earlier work in computational creativity by, for example, Bentley (1999b), Perkins (1996) and Thornton (2007), and in more remote areas of study such as Bergson (1998) and de Landa (1991).
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Acknowledgements
This chapter stems from ideas formed during my PhD with Geraint Wiggins at Goldsmiths, University of London, and further developed whilst working as a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Electronic Media Art (CEMA), with Jon McCormack (funded by the Australian Research Council under Discovery Project grant DP0877320). I thank Jon, Alan Dorin, Alice Eldridge and the other members of CEMA for two years of fascinating recursive discussions.
I am grateful to all of the attendees of the 2009 Dagstuhl symposium on Computational Creativity, in particular the organisers, Jon McCormack, Mark d’Inverno and Maggie Boden, for contributing to a first-rate creative experience. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.
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Bown, O. (2012). Generative and Adaptive Creativity: A Unified Approach to Creativity in Nature, Humans and Machines. In: McCormack, J., d’Inverno, M. (eds) Computers and Creativity. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31727-9_14
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