Idea generation as a social practice | Seweryn Rudnicki

The aim of this presentation is to outline a possibility of a fresh way of conceptualizing idea generation by treating it as a social practice – with its own history, variations, social distribution, and connections to other practices.

Creativity has been predominantly treated as a domain of intrapsychic forces and mechanisms that could be best studied from psychological or cognitive perspective. This presentation argues that it could be beneficial to explore another possibility – to view idea generation as a social practice i.e. something that people do in socially organized ways.

The presentation draws on two streams of research. First, it builds on studies exploring historical, social and cultural aspects of creativity and its emergence in current forms in the mid-twentieth century (e.g., Van Eekelen 2017, 2018; Reckwitz 2018; Franklin 2023). Second, it draws on the current wave of practice theories (sometimes labelled as a “practice turn” in social theory) seeing social life as consisted of practices i.e. temporally evolving, open-ended sets of doings and sayings (Schatzki et al. 2001; Shove et al. 2012; Hui et al. 2017).

As the speaker will argue, the practice-oriented view on idea generation may be helpful in understanding historicity and diversity of organized forms of idea generation – how they emerge, transform, evolve, or disappear. It also has a potential to account for creativity and idea generation as not predominantly mental processes but the ones essentially involving materials and semiotic elements. Finally, this framework makes it possible to interpret the contemporary ways of practicing creativity as resulting from modifications of the past configurations in an always-open but also socially-regulated process.