Boden suggests 3 different types of creativity:
combinatorial exploratory and transformative
may be a useful way to think about value in art
“Creativity can be defined as the ability to generate
novel, and valuable, ideas. Valuable, here, has
many meanings: interesting, useful, beautiful, simple,
richly complex, and so on. Ideas covers many
meanings too: not only ideas as such (concepts,
theories, interpretations, stories), but also artifacts
such as graphic images, sculptures, houses, and jet
engines. Computer models have been designed to
generate ideas in all these areas and more (Boden……………….
As for novel, that has two importantly different
meanings: psychological and historical. A psychological
novelty, or P-creative idea, is one that’s new
to the person who generated it. It doesn’t matter how
many times, if any, other people have had that
idea before. A historical novelty, or H-creative idea,
is one that is P-creative and has never occurred in
history before
Combinational creativity produces unfamiliar
combinations of familiar ideas, and it works by
making associations between ideas that were previously
only indirectly linked. Examples include
many cases of poetic imagery, collage in visual art,
and mimicry of cuckoo song in a classical symphony.
Analogy is a form of combinational creativity
that exploits shared conceptual structure
and is widely used in science as well as art. (Think
of William Harvey’s description of the heart as a
pump, or of the Bohr-Rutherford solar system
model of the atom.)
It is combinational creativity that is usually
mentioned in definitions of “creativity” and that
(almost always) is studied by experimental psychologists
specializing in creativity. But the other
two types are important too
Exploratory creativity rests on some culturally
accepted style of thinking, or “conceptual space.”
This may be a theory of chemical molecules, a style
of painting or music, or a particular national cuisine.
The space is defined (and constrained) by a
set of generative rules. Usually, these rules are
largely, or even wholly, implicit. Every structure
produced by following them will fit the style concerned,
just as any word string generated by English
syntax will be a gramatically acceptable English
sentence.
(Style-defining rules should not be confused
with the associative rules that underlie combinational
creativity. It’s true that associative rules generate—
that is, produce—combinations. But they
do this in a very different way from grammarlike
rules. It is the latter type that are normally called
“generative rules” by AI scientists.)
In exploratory creativity, the person moves
through the space, exploring it to find out what’s
there (including previously unvisited locations)—
and, in the most interesting cases, to discover both
the potential and the limits of the space in question.
These are the “most interesting” cases
because they may lead on to the third form of creativity,
which can be the most surprising of all.
In transformational creativity, the space or style
itself is transformed by altering (or dropping) one
or more of its defining dimensions. As a result,
ideas can now be generated that simply could not
have been generated before the change. For
instance, if all organic molecules are basically
strings of carbon atoms, then benzene can’t be a
ring structure. In suggesting that this is indeed
what benzene is, the chemist Friedrich von Kekule
had to transform the constraint string (open curve)
into that of ring (closed curve). This stylistic transformation
made way for the entire space of aromatic
chemistry, which chemists would explore
[sic] for many years.
The more stylistically fundamental the altered
constraint, the more surprising—even shocking—
the new ideas will be. It may take many years for
people to grow accustomed to the new space and
to become adept at producing or recognizing the
ideas that it makes possible. The history of science,
and of art too, offers many sad examples of people
ignored, even despised, in their lifetimes whose
ideas were later recognized as hugely valuable.
(Think of Ignaz Semmelweiss and Vincent van
Gogh, for instance. The one was reviled for saying
that puerperal fever could be prevented if doctors
washed their hands, and went mad as a result; the
other sold only one painting in his lifetime.)
Transformational creativity is the “sexiest” of
the three types, because it can give rise to ideas
that are not only new but fundamentally different
from any that went before. As such, they are often
highly counterintuitive. (It’s sometimes said that
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