Creative “conversations” with materials

Crafts processes command interest in how they braid embodied know-how, i.e. highly complex sensorimotor skills, with creativity. Creativity here typically happens in a conversation with the material as it is being formed and changed, which reveals creative potentials in the process. Rather than implying a mental projection of a full-fledged idea, crafts creativity utilizes the skilful interaction with the material and its qualities. This process has seldom been explored at a micro-scale. This cognitive project investigates three creative crafts domains: blacksmiths, ceramicists and tailors. The idea is to put under the magnifying glass the process of how creative artifacts emerge and to hereby reconstruct how novelty gradually takes shape. Specifically, we will inquire which creative routing decisions guide the process during preparation and while interacting with materials, what hands, eyes and ears are doing (e.g. in querying the material), as well as how as persons imagination, technical repertoires, and aesthetic preferences impact the process. The project starts off with semi-structured interviews conducted at the crafts experts workshops. The aim is to learn about how the person works, what preferred themes, aesthetic strategies, and creative interests are, while sampling representative works and work practices. During the main stage of the project four blacksmiths, ceramicists and tailors are invited for two double sessions, for an open and a constrained creative task respectively. They will be filmed by two cameras while working; then an interview supported by video feedback is conducted. A method known as Explication interviewing, which guides attention towards details, is used to support them in verbalizing/ becoming aware of mental and sensorimotor aspects. This dialogic approach makes it possible, for example, to reconstruct how chance events while handling the material give rise to creative options (i.e. serendipity) or to reconstruct how aha moments emerge. The first step of the interview is to create a process timeline with a high-zoom factors (preparations, decision points, logic of the whole process). Next, particulars are taken into view: the interplay of perception and imagination, creative combinatorics of techniques, as well as alternative creative paths not taken. In the projects final phase, four independent experts from each domain are brought in to rate the collected process timelines at decision points, applying objective criteria from creativity scholarship. We hereby aim to contrast the subjective with external viewpoints. The general objective of this project is to provide a precise analytic language for embodied creative processes, which is simultaneously anchored in the experience of experts. The project outcomes will benefit the transfer of embodied know-how, produce visualization forms (e.g. for museum infographics), as well as proposing a model of the rich cognitive basis of crafts competencies.