Cognitive Complexity Scale And Key

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THE ACT OF COLLABORATIVE CREATION AND THE ART OF INTEGRATIVE CREATIVITY: ORIGINALITY, DISCIPLINARITY AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY Diana Rhoten, Erin O’Connor and Edward Hackett

ABSTRACT Csikszentmihalyi (1999: 314) argues that ‘creativity is a process that can be observed only at the intersection where individuals, domains, and fields intersect’. This article discusses the relationship between creativity and interdisciplinarity in science. It is specifically concerned with interdisciplinary collaboration, interrogating the processes that contribute to the collaborative creation of original ideas and the practices that enable creative integration of diverse domains. It draws on results from a novel real-world experiment in which small interdisciplinary groups of graduate students were tasked with producing an innovative scientific research problem and an integrative research proposal. Results show that while bisociative thinking assists in the creation of original research problems, both disciplinary skills and an interdisciplinary disposition are core to the integration of creative research proposals. Extrapolating from the results of this experiment, the article discusses the feasibility of preparing students for such work and the implications for universities and other intellectual centers. KEYWORDS collaboration • complexity • creativity • interdisciplinarity • sociology of science

Thesis Eleven, Number 96, February 2009: 83–108 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd DOI: 10.1177/0725513608099121

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The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationship with the other ideas, with the ideas of others. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics

INTRODUCTION The very act of creation in science involves the combination and recombination of previously unrelated ideas to form original and unconventional assemblages (Hebb, 1958; Koestler, 1964; Simonton, 1988). While it is possible for novel assemblages to emerge from the permutation of ideas within a single discipline, it is increasingly believed that the creation of new scientific knowledge – creativity – is enabled and accelerated by fusing ideas from multiple disciplines: ‘The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures – of two galaxies, so far as that goes – ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the breakthroughs came’ (Snow, 1964: 6). Faith in the alchemic powers of interdisciplinarity to generate creative opportunities and thereby yield transformative discoveries has led philosophers, policy-makers, and pedagogues alike to argue for ‘interdisciplinary and collaborative research [as] the norm rather than the exception’ (Bement, 2005). It is said, for example, that cross-disciplinary collaboration can ‘liberate a person’s thinking . . . and stimulate fresh vision’ (Milgram, 1969: 103), create new thought collectives or paradigms (Fleck, 1979; Kuhn, 1970), open new spheres of inquiry (Hackett, 2005; Rheinberger, 1997), and boldly challenge orthodoxy (Hook, 2002). Indeed, examples of interdisciplinary collaborations are observable in the history of science, and in some cases have led to breakthroughs. Consider, for example, the role of physics in the discovery of DNA and the rise of molecular biology. However, while advocates and anecdotes endorse the transformative potential of interdisciplinarity, few, if any, have tried to expose – let alone empiricize – the act of collaborative creation and the art of creative integration that underlie this potential. The process by which individuals identify new questions or problems and the practices by which they assemble disparate ideas into new concepts, approaches or paradigms to address them is generally underspecified. It is seen as ‘a mysterious black box or kaleidoscopic step’, even by those who believe creativity and interdisciplinarity can be understood well enough to be taught. Beyond arguing that scientific creativity is at least partly ‘the consequence of trained skills’, Carl Leopold does little to elaborate what these skills are, let alone how to cultivate them (Leopold, 1978: 437). More recently, David Sill (2001) has proposed a theoretical model of interdisciplinarity and creativity; yet he neither tests nor builds it. Thus, we are left with many aspirational assumptions and theoretical propositions about creativity and interdisciplinarity but few empirical explanations of what

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many have come to accept blithely as the intuitive leaps, happy accidents, or serendipitous events that lead to discovery. In an effort to overcome this challenge, we attempt here to unpack the black box of creativity and to capture observable steps toward interdisciplinarity. This effort is part of a larger study of the intellectual, social, and cultural workings and outcomes of the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program. The IGERT program was established in 1997 by the National Science Foundation to meet the challenges of educating PhD scientists and engineers with interdisciplinary backgrounds to be ‘creative agents for change’ (NSF, 2002). In this study we used surveys, interviews, site visits, and social network analysis to examine program design, institutional context, and research outputs. From this work we learned about IGERT student motivations, interactions, and aspirations. What remained unknown, however, was if and how the IGERT program impacts student approaches to cross-disciplinary collaboration and student abilities with interdisciplinary integration in ways distinct from more traditional graduate programs. To address such questions, which reflect the IGERT program’s highest goals, we designed a unique social science experiment along the lines of a ‘charrette’,1 challenging a national mixed sample of IGERT-trained students and traditionally trained graduate students to engage in an intensive exercise focused on collaborative and integrative research design that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In this article, we begin by establishing our working definition of interdisciplinarity and our conceptual approach to the study of creativity. We then introduce the charrette methodology we deployed to test for the influences of IGERT training on student approaches to collaborative and integrative research design. In reviewing the results from the charrette experiment, we demonstrate the influence of bisociative thinking processes in the act of cross-disciplinary, collaborative creation as well as the relative importance of disciplinary skills versus an interdisciplinary disposition to the art of creative, interdisciplinary integration.2, 3 We conclude by considering the implications of these results for universities and other intellectual centers seeking to cultivate creativity and interdisciplinarity in the sciences. DEFINING INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND CONCEPTUALIZING CREATIVITY In recent years, interdisciplinarity has become synonymous with all things creative about scientific research. The interdisciplinary imperative has arisen not from a simple philosophic belief in interdisciplinarity but from the character of the research problems currently under study (see, for example, Chubin et al., 1986; DeTombe, 1999; Kahn and Prager, 1994; Klein, 1990; Nissani, 1997). Some suggest that the intellectual context of 21st-century science has changed in ways that not only allow but perhaps demand greater

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cross-disciplinary collaboration and interdisciplinary integration to stimulate breakthroughs that transcend the orderly puzzles of normal science. In many fields, it is argued, scholars are confronted with challenges that defy the formulation of research questions and problems in a traditional disciplinary format. In some instances this is because the research questions are ambitious and encompassing, implicating several domains in the framing. In others, it is because research problems are of such increased niche specificity that, although narrow, they are interstitial, and thus demand the involvement of multiple subdisciplines. The assumption here is that, given the preponderance of intellectual research done within the separate and distinct disciplines, there is opportunity for unique and inventive knowledge to emerge across and between them. Chemists, for example, can no longer find a significant research topic that is purely chemical in nature, and are forced instead to draw upon knowledge and skills from physics, biology, engineering, or even more distant areas (Schowen, 1998). Pressing environmental concerns, including the hydrologic cycle, ecosystems functioning, global climate change, and sustainable development, cannot be addressed adequately without collective input from researchers in agriculture, biology, computer science, forestry, hydrology, mathematics, resource management, social science, and engineering (see, for example, Lubchenco, 1998). In the life sciences, it is argued that ‘[f]uture innovations in the biomedical sciences will arise even faster if physicists, chemists, engineers, and computer scientists can work shoulder-to-shoulder with the biomedical scientists’ (Cech, 2005: 1392). The breadth of disciplinary skills and knowledge required to tackle such problems or questions often exceed not just the limits of intellectual discipline but also of individual capacity, thus requiring both integration of diverse domains and increased collaboration between researchers of different fields. Across the literature, the term ‘interdisciplinary’ is used to refer to a continuum of possible meanings and activities ranging from an individual’s orientation toward knowledge acquisition to a system-wide shift in knowledge production, with intermediate and variant notions in between. Running through these diverse definitions, however, is a common thread: interdisciplinarity refers to the integration or synthesis of two or more disparate disciplines, bodies of knowledge, or modes of thinking to produce a meaning, explanation, or product that is more extensive and powerful than its constituent parts (Boix Mansilla and Gardner, 2003; Klein, 1996; Kocklemans, 1979; Weingart and Stehr, 2000). Furthermore, underpinning its various expressions are four basic categories of interdisciplinary execution: cross-fertilization, team-collaboration, field-creation, and problem-orientation. These categories are not meant to suggest a progression in quality or complexity; they are simply heuristics to ground analysis in a common language and anchor it in observable actions. In this article, we are most concerned with interdisciplinarity as a collaborative practice, whereby multiple researchers with mastery

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in their distinct fields or disciplines work collectively as a network or team of individuals to trade and exchange tools, concepts, ideas, data, methods, or results around a common project or problem. From this perspective, we understand interdisciplinarity as both a process and a practice by which a set of purposeful arrangements and a sense of community are established to iterate and ultimately integrate ideas with others into an end product (Rhoten, 2003; Rhoten and Pfirman, 2007). The field of creative studies is itself an interdisciplinary venture, engaging participants from domains across the behavioral, learning, and social sciences as well as the design, arts, and humanities fields. Within this broad and eclectic undertaking, a few dominant approaches to the study of creativity have emerged. Some scholars consider creativity in terms of the abilities and characteristics of the person(s) engaged in activities such as inventing, designing, and composing (see for example, Barron and Harrington, 1981; Gardner, 1993). Some approach creativity from the perspective of the product, focusing on the creation of the novel, original, significant thing (see, for example, Amabile, 1997; Besemer and O’Quin, 1993); while others view creativity in terms of the process, independent of the character or quality of the resulting outputs (see for example, Drazin et al., 1999; Ford, 1996). Still others conceptualize creativity in terms of the spatial and temporal place: the social networks, the cultural conditions, and the institutional bases that facilitate creative opportunities in the moment (see, for example, Collins, 1998; Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). This basic ‘Ps’ typology of person, product, place, and process offers a neat if overly simplified way to categorize research approaches to creativity. As Elizabeth Watson argues, however: ‘It does not attempt to provide a model for understanding connections between any of these factors of analysis’ (Watson, 2007: 424). More recently, a few scholars, including Simonton (1999; 2004), among others, have tried to conceptualize creativity more as a phenomenon, understanding it in terms of the interaction rather than the isolation of these different factors. Thus, like Simonton, we see creativity in science as necessarily being about the bringing together of diverse ideas, methods, and materials to produce novel questions, explanations or solutions, which is inevitably influenced by the individuals and institutions involved. Moreover, like Sill (2001), we are particularly interested in what this multi-factor approach to the study of creativity as a phenomenon can tell us about the promise of interdisciplinary collaboration. Borrowing terms from Csikszentmihalyi (1999), Simonton (2004) argues that each individual scientist operates in a specific disciplinary context, which consists of two essential components – namely, the domain and the field. The domain is a set of symbolic rules and procedures, techniques and theories, facts and concepts. The field, by comparison, includes all the individuals who work with the ideas of the domain, deciding if and when a new idea or product should be allowed and included. Each scientist during his or her

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training and education becomes a member of a field and acquires a sample of ideas from those that define the larger domain. Some will possess a large supply of disciplinary skills and knowledge – vocabularies, laws, methods, modes of inquiry, etc. – whereas others will have smaller samples. The disciplinary skills and knowledge that each individual possesses are then subject to the possibility of recombination, with the aim of finding original and useful interdisciplinary permutations or assemblages (Campbell, 1960; James, 1880). Whereas Einstein called this process the ‘combinatorial play’, Simonton calls it a model of ‘combinatorial chance’ (that is, bisociative thinking). Given that scientists cannot easily know which ideas in the early phases of collaborative creation will yield successfully creative integrations, they must be willing and wanting to engage in generating different interdisciplinary combinations and recombinations with others (that is, interdisciplinary disposition), while relying on internal criteria to evaluate which one will be a promising idea (that is, disciplinary skill). Building on Simonton’s model, and drawing from Sill (2001) and Koestler (1964), we argue, then, that the key characteristics of achieving collaborative creation and creative integration in the context of science include bisociative thinking, disciplinary skill, and interdisciplinary disposition. The question is whether these attributes can be taught and with what approach. TEACHING INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND CREATIVITY Carl Leopold noted 30 years ago: ‘The world community recognizes that progress in the arts, in the professions, and in science and technology relies exquisitely on the creativity of the people in these professions’ (Leopold, 1978: 436). Given that much of traditional science is about extracting objective information and seeking simplification for understanding, it is still generally easier and more efficient to advance one’s scientific career by presenting (and re-presenting) artifacts of disciplinary work. While there are individuals with ‘creative attitudes’ (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi, 1964: 125) in the sciences who are impelled to seek complexity and to discover alternative ways of understanding, a critical challenge is how to prepare and support such individuals who often find themselves drawn toward interdisciplinarity. In the United States, federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to reform graduate education and training programs in ways that prepare students for new modes of cross-disciplinary collaboration and interdisciplinary integration (Martin and Umberger, 2003). One of the most expansive and deliberate of these efforts is the Integrative Graduate Education Research and Training (IGERT) initiative. Implemented in 1997, the IGERT initiative is designed specifically to meet the challenges of educating PhD scientists and engineers in multidisciplinary backgrounds with the goal being to ‘catalyze a cultural change in graduate education for students, faculty, and

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institutions by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries’ (NSF, 2002). The IGERT initiative espouses a distinctive model of graduate education that aims explicitly to develop scientists and engineers capable of working across disciplinary boundaries, focusing on problem-oriented research, collaborating well in teams, and engaging broad audiences. There are approximately 125 campus-based IGERT programs in the United States today, each organized around an interdisciplinary research theme deemed appropriate for doctoral-level research (for example, hybrid neural microsystems, marine biodiversity). Within the theme, IGERT students earn their PhD in a major field of study, while gaining exposure to other cognate fields vis-à-vis participation in various research-based education and training activities. Based on the voluntary application and extremely competitive stipend, IGERT programs draw highly qualified students who have self-selected into interdisciplinary training. Root-Bernstein showed that it was the scientists trained in an unusual way who tended to be the most inventive (Root-Bernstein, 1991). In a similar vein, we wanted to know if students trained in the IGERT program are more collaborative, integrative, and therefore creative than their colleagues trained in more traditional graduate programs. In short, is the IGERT program producing ‘creative agents for change’ per its aspirations (NSF, 2002)? Research Methods A standard approach to understanding scientific creation or creativity has been to examine scientific products, typically publications. As Merton notes, however, the ‘scientific paper or monograph presents an immaculate appearance which reproduces little or nothing of the intuitive leaps, false starts, mistakes, loose ends, and happy accidents that actually cluttered up the inquiry. The public record of science therefore fails to provide many of the source materials needed to reconstruct the actual course of scientific developments’ (Merton, 1968: 4). Moreover, the lack of methods for judging interdisciplinary education and measuring its direct impacts on student learning is one of the biggest obstacles to advancing interdisciplinarity (Klein, 1996; Lattuca, 2001). Most approaches tend to focus on single measures or reductionist strategies and are not well suited to capture the interaction of cognition, skills, and disposition in cross-disciplinary collaboration and interdisciplinary integration. Given the shortcomings of available methodologies to address our interest in the IGERT program’s impact on the phenomenon of creativity and the dynamics of interdisciplinarity, we designed our own novel social science approach by marrying experimental and observational methods as well as sociological and psychological perspectives. Our approach was modeled after the ‘charrette’ process, which challenges students to solve a collaborative design problem within a fixed period

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of time and to then present their work to fellow students and faculty in a critiqued presentation. The principal aim of the charrette was to comparatively observe the collaborative processes and evaluate the integrative products of graduate students trained in IGERT programs versus those in more traditional departmental programs. In addition, to capture the intervention effects of graduate school versus innate traits of students, we also compared students in the first two years of graduate school with students in later years of schooling. Like the IGERT programs themselves, we anchored the charrette in a thematic area appropriate for graduate research – environmental and ecological sustainability. The charrette involved a nationally recruited sample of 48 students – half from IGERT programs, half from traditional graduate programs – of varied geographic, disciplinary, and institutional origin. From this sample we formed eight groups of six students. As shown in Table 1, groups were homogeneously composed of IGERT or non-IGERT and Junior (years one or two) or Senior (years three and beyond) students, but were heterogeneous in their inclusion of students from the life, physical, and social sciences. Students were assigned to their group and work room when they arrived on site. In addition to computers and office supplies, each room was also equipped with a video camera that recorded activities at the table, three microphones distributed around the table to capture discussion, and a trained observer who kept notes. All student groups received the same collaborative research design challenge on the first night, and were given 2.5 days to process the problem as well as produce a seven-page proposal and 20-minute presentation. While the collaborative processes were documented and evaluated by observers, the integrative products were scored and reviewed by a panel of experts. In addition to providing written evaluations, experts rated the proposals according to 15 aspects, using common criteria and five-point scales (1 = poor to 5 = excellent), which we adapted from the work of Veronica Boix Mansilla and her colleagues (2008).4 Table 1 Schematic design of charrette I

II

IGERT

Non-IGERT

IGERT

Non-IGERT

Group A

Group B

Group E

Group F

Mariculture Group

Lawn Group

Estuary Group

Salmon Group

SENIOR

Group C

Group D

Group G

Group H

(3rd year + students)

Riverine Group

Potable Water Group

Urbanization Group

Nutrient Group

JUNIOR (1st and 2nd year students)

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BISOCIATIVE THINKING, DISCIPLINARY SKILLS, AND INTERDISCIPLINARY DISPOSITION Julie Thompson Klein writes that ‘interdisciplinarity is neither a subject matter nor a body of content. It is a process for achieving an interpretative synthesis, a process that usually begins with a problem, question, topic, or issue’ (1990: 188). For the purposes of the charrette and the desire to study cross-disciplinary collaboration and interdisciplinary integration, each of the groups was given the same problem prompt: Ecosystem services of various sorts (e.g. purification of air and water, mitigation of floods and droughts, detoxification and decomposition of wastes, pollination of crops and natural vegetation, partial stabilization of climate, soil fertilization, maintenance of biodiversity, and such) are vital for the lives of humans and other species as well as for the continued viability of ecosystems. However, considerable evidence is accumulating to suggest that changes in climate, land use, and other human activities may be altering the performance of ecosystems and the services they deliver. Your challenge is twofold. First, pose a scientific question concerning the interaction of human activities and one or two specific ecosystem services. Then, propose the best ‘next generation’ research plan to analyze this question in two strategically chosen geographic sites that have comparatively different levels of human activity. . . . Your proposed research should be novel and original in both the approaches it deploys and the insights it yields. As mentioned above, data were collected both on group processes through trained observation and on group products via expert evaluation. We begin the discussion of the charrette results by looking at the experts’ assessment of the student groups’ research proposals and presentations on the dimensions of originality, interdisciplinarity, and disciplinarity. Expert comments about the proposal which rated highly on all three measures – originality, interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity – used phrases like the following in their review of the proposal: ‘relatively unique framework’, ‘compelling problem for society’, ‘strong conceptual model’, ‘disciplinary methods and techniques . . . are very strong’, ‘good interdisciplinary thinking’, ‘well-motivated [and] carefully justified’ and ‘provocative and clear presentation’. By comparison, expert comments about the proposal that rated poorly on all three dimensions offered comments such as: ‘group was clearly enthusiastic, broke with mainstream,’ ‘proposed study was original [but not] . . . well posed,’ ‘not convinced that it addressed an issue of the highest scientific and/or societal urgency,’ ‘picked an overstudied system,’ ‘proposal is too rigid in its approach,’ ‘naïve expectations,’ ‘dominant role of one group member,’ and ‘presenters had [difficulty] in stating the problem, in identifying the hypotheses, and in describing the broader impact.’ Three of the top scoring proposals on ‘originality’ were Groups A and E (both Junior IGERT) and Group D (Senior non-IGERT). In keeping with David Bohm’s view that creativity within science is not simply about a ‘different take’ on an already existing problem or about addressing the ‘lacunae’ of

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an already-existing issue (1996: 16–17), ‘originality’ of the group proposals was assessed on the basis of whether it innovated new ideas, approaches, and topics. Although all three of these groups identified a topic related to some aspect of water, each took up very different concerns and approaches to the topic: Group A – the ‘Mariculture Group’ – focused on ‘human food supply and ecologically sustainable mariculture’, Group D – the ‘Potable Water Group’ – on ‘human impacts on ecosystem regulation of potable water’, and Group E – the ‘Estuary Group’ – on ‘natural disturbances, human use and estuary resilience’. In addition, each group took what might be called a coupled natural-human systems approach to their particular water-related problem. As shown below, the narratives of expert reviews reveal this coupled conceptual framework, which melds social with natural sciences and frames the problem within a new set of relations, to be the primary factor explaining their mutually high ranking on originality. Moreover, in groups where this framework was achieved, the observers’ notes on and the videotaped segments of the groups’ brainstorming at the stage of idea generation clearly evidence processes indicative of bisociative thinking. Interestingly, on the dimension of interdisciplinarity, both the Estuary Group and the Potable Water Group were top scoring while the Mariculture Group was not. Experts were asked to rank proposals based on the degree to which the stated problem and the research approach was interdisciplinary, integrative, and synthetic. Specifically: (1) Does the proposal draw from different disciplinary literatures relevant to the proposed study? (2) Does the proposal address a holistic topic and present an integrated framework to approach that topic? (3) Is there a sense of balance in the overall composition of the proposal with regard to how the disciplines are brought together? Proposals that scored highly on this aggregate metric of interdisciplinarity were generally deemed not just inclusive but integrative, and as having successfully generated an approach that actually metabolized the different disciplines presented in their frameworks. This differs from saying that the groups avoided allocating topics or tasks by discipline. For example, the work patterns of the Potable Water Group, though rated highly for interdisciplinarity, very concretely divided the tasks of the group between natural and social scientists, as well as by discipline and skill within those categories. As we will show, the key to integrative work may lie less in overt procedures thought to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration than in the disciplinary pieces that ultimately comprise the whole. Thus, whereas the Estuary Group was identified as having an ‘inherently integrative approach’ and the Potable Water Group was commended for having ‘a conceptual model of interactions between land use, water quality and human perception’, the Mariculture Group was critiqued for being disjointed and disconnected: ‘the remediation of an ecosystem service seems only tangential to the economic/mariculture aspects emphasized in the proposal.’ As we argue below, we believe this difference in interdisciplinary scores between the Mariculture Group and the Estuary

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and Potable Water Groups is best explained by the fact that the latter two not only employed a coupled natural-human framework but also anchored their approach in a complex dynamic that served as a mechanism of integration. Again, on the dimension of disciplinarity, both the Estuary Group and the Potable Water Group were top scoring while the Mariculture Group was not. Experts were asked to rank the proposals according to the degree to which they represented disciplinary soundness in both problem and approach: (1) Is the proposal well-grounded in disciplinary works that are relevant to the proposed study? (2) Does the proposal accurately and effectively use disciplinary knowledge? (3) Does the proposal accurately and effectively propose the use of disciplinary research methods? In the reviews of both the Estuary and Potable Water groups, experts pointed to disciplinary methods and techniques as the ‘strength’ and ‘foundation’ on which the proposal was built rather than constrained. In these groups, we will argue, it was the disciplinary-driven but interdisciplinary-shaped worldview of dynamic complexity that both enabled the collaborative process and led to the integrative proposal. We turn now to the observational data to reveal more about the act of creation and art of creativity that explain these scores and comments. The Act of Creation – Brainstorming an Original Problem Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1964) suggest that the most important part of creativity may be the framing, discovery, or envisioning of the creative question to be answered or problem to be solved. And, indeed, negotiating and constructing shared understanding around a problem, question, or issue is inherently collaborative as well as creative (Miell and Littleton, 2004). In discussing approaches to problem-solving and applying the work of Koestler (1964), Scott and Bruce (1994) identify two primary styles: bisociative and associative. Whereas bisociative thinking involves combining separate domains without rules in order to encourage new connections and innovative outcomes, associative thinking is about building upon ideas, habits, and logics of a single domain. One style is not better than the other, and arguably in order for creative processes like brainstorming (Osborn, 1953) to yield scientifically rigorous outcomes, both types of cognitive processing are required: bisociative in order to generate original ideas, and associative in order to evaluate and refine those ideas (Finke et al., 1992). That said, and as our data suggest, premature evaluation during the idea generation stage of the creative thinking process can inhibit creativity (Kilgour, 2006). To demonstrate the role of bisociative and associative thinking in generating original problems, we contrast the Estuary Group, the Potable Water Group, and the Mariculture Group with the Salmon Group (Group F, Senior IGERT). According to the observer’s field notes, the Estuary Group approached the idea generation or problem identification phase of the charrette exercise by setting out to ask a ‘big theoretical question.’ To do so, the group began

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the brainstorming process by trying to isolate, in their words, ‘a good and broad theoretical question, which would have findings relevant for both natural and social sciences’ (Student Quote, Field Notes, Group E) rather than by conducting an inventory of the individual talents and interests represented within the group. Early in the process, the group considered ‘water’ as a potential topic because of its capacity to accommodate multiple disciplines. They rather quickly rejected this concept as flawed, however, asserting that while it covered a broad range of issues and disciplines, their aim should be to identify a good question rather than a topic which would take advantage of everyone’s expertise perfectly’ (Student Quote, Field Notes, Group E). At the interstices of pure abstraction and empirical comparison, the Estuary Group shortly thereafter hit upon the concept of ‘estuary resilience’. As an abstract but observable dynamic, resilience catalyzed a tightly coupled naturalhuman systems approach that integrated the ecological and economic domain areas of the group members. Only after the group had established the conceptual significance of resilience did it turn to routine operational matters more typical of associative thinking, such as specifying sites, methods, and metrics. Similar to the Estuary Group, the Mariculture Group approached the problem identification process by brainstorming abstract theoretical concepts. However, whereas the Estuary Group began by simply seeking to imagine the broadest question imaginable with no parameters, the Mariculture Group first took stock of the skills and perspectives of the group, deliberately seeking a problem that would unite them. It was in the middle of discussing monoculture that members of the group found themselves suddenly arguing about the notion of ‘biodiversity’. While the group had been previously divided between land and water topics, the catalytic theoretical concept of ‘biodiversity’ brought these two domains together in what was again a coupled natural-human systems framework. By using biodiversity as the linking mechanism and relinquishing traditional boundaries between land and water, group members were actually able to reinterpret and reimagine what is typically understood to be a land-based problem as a water-based problem. In so doing, the group transposed the problem of ecologically sustainable food production from land to water, moving from agriculture to aquaculture, and ultimately from aquaculture into mariculture to inventively coin the novel term and frame of ‘aqualogy’ as its problem. Like the Estuary and Mariculture Groups, the Potable Water Group was immediately drawn to the overarching theme of water because of its potential breadth and inclusivity. Also like the Mariculture Group, this group catalogued all of the members’ skills and backgrounds prior to brainstorming possible research problems. In fact, the group did so in order to intentionally limit their consideration to ‘overlapping research questions and interests’ (Student Quote, Field Notes, Group D). Indeed, the Mariculture Group ultimately generated a novel and original problem of ‘potable water’, but doing

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so involved numerous topic reiterations and refinements. As compared to the other high ranking groups, where the brainstorming processes followed a trajectory from bisociative to associative thinking, the Potable Water Group’s process is better characterized as mini-cycles of both bisociative and associative thinking. After several rounds of imagining and refining concepts of land-use and human perception, the group arrived at the theoretical concept of ‘potable water’ based on the social science logics that some group members deemed salient to a ‘good’ research question. Like the two groups above, this group also framed their problem in the tightly coupled natural-human systems approach, which we believe engendered high originality ratings for all three groups. As a quick point of contrast, consider the Salmon Group, which was the lowest-scoring group in terms of originality. This group, despite being Senior IGERT students, approached the problem identification process with specialist lenses from the outset. That is to say, unlike the Mariculture and Potable Water Groups which first accounted for group members’ disciplines and then brainstormed different problems that would accommodate their intellectual diversity, the Salmon Group chose its topic – the Klamath River Basin – almost immediately and strictly on the bases of the idea’s capacity to serve the groups’ disciplinary ‘legitimacy’, ‘expedience’ and ‘applicability’ (Field Notes, Group F). While one student tried to stimulate more discussion with comments like ‘I’m a big picture person,’ the group’s collective style was much more reflective of another student’s self-characterization: ‘I tend to criticize rather than create’ (Student Quote, Field Notes, Group F). Equally indicative of this group’s more associative approach was another student’s observation noted that she ‘hesitates to go far outside the realm of knowledge, as it will take more time and effort’, while still another argued for ‘keeping close to home’. Not only did the group’s associative approach prematurely commit the group to a problem within the first working hour of the charrette, it did so in a manner that constrained the group’s approach to a linear, site-based logic rather than enabling a dynamic, concept-driven frame. What we see across the three most original groups is a correlation between a group’s use of theoretical concepts like resilience, biodiversity, and potability as stimuli to problem identification and their tendency to demonstrate greater rates of bisociative thinking in the brainstorming process. Given the assumptions about connections between interdisciplinarity and creativity, we expected IGERT students would produce more original work than their counterparts, particularly senior students in the later years of graduate study. IGERT programs are intended to instill (or reinforce) in students the proclivity and means to work in new ways – across disciplines, outside usual academic boundaries, and with greater attention to societal needs and benefits – and we reasoned that time in graduate school would enhance such traits. Contrary to these hypotheses, the two Senior IGERTs were not among the highest scoring groups in originality. In fact, they were

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the two lowest scoring groups in this metric of creativity. We attempt to unpack this unexpected finding below. The Art of Creativity – Combining Disciplinary Skills and Interdisciplinary Disposition In this subsection, we focus on the two proposals that scored highest on originality as well as on interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity: the Potable Water Group (Senior non-IGERT) and the Estuary Group (Junior IGERT). We show that while bisociative processes were necessary steps towards generating an original research problem, insofar as this type of thinking allowed new combinatorials of domains, bisociation alone is not sufficient to create an integrated product. Each individual in an interdisciplinary group typically, whether consciously or subconsciously, works from the perspective of his or her own discipline(s). Disciplines differ in what events or data are interpretable, what methods they espouse, and what kinds of explanations are deemed satisfactory. But as Journet (1993) argues, some of the problems in interdisciplinary interaction result not just from an individual’s inculcation in a domain but also from his or her allegiance to it. Hence, we were not surprised to find that those groups which identified a problem that was not simply abstract but rather one that was inherently dynamic and complex were more successful in bringing interdisciplinarity to originality. For over 20 years scientists like the ecologist C. S. Holling and Nobel prize chemist Ilya Prigogine have contended that a science of complexity is emerging with fundamentally different features than what is often referred to as the traditional ‘scientific ideal’ (Abel, 1998). Whereas the core assumptions underlying the scientific ideal include reductionism, linear causation, and mechanistic experimentation with the entity as units of analysis, the science of complexity is characterized by perspectives such as holism, mutual causation, and adaptive evolution with the relationship between factors being the primary unit of analysis. Complexity hinges on the critical interdependencies, elevates feedback loops, and often relies on multivariate and multiscaled models to represent the dynamics of the knowledge therein. While the science of complexity represents an inherently interdisciplinary view of the world (Sanders, 1998), executing this paradigmatic shift from reductionism to integrated synergism depends on the successful representation, verification, and organization of disciplinary knowledge (Wierzbicki, 2007). As we show below, then, complexity science is an art that requires the pairing of disciplinary skills with an interdisciplinary disposition. Although the Mariculture Group ranked second in terms of originality, it scored relatively low on both interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity measures. We argue this is because although the group’s research problem congealed around the broad theoretical concept of ‘biodiversity’ and was anchored in a natural-human systems frame – it was not constructed as a complex dynamic. Rather than employing biodiversity as a heuristic to ‘understand’ the dynamic

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interaction between natural and human factors when addressing the problem of sustainable food production, the Mariculture Group simply used the concept to transpose the problem from one application area to another. In this sense, biodiversity operated as a linear catalyst but not as a complex catalyst. Consequently, the problem was inclusive in that it allowed for the input of multiple disciplines, but it was ultimately not integrative as it did not actually demand grounding in and feedback between the theory, data, and perspectives of diverse domains. Thus, while enabling novelty, it did not facilitate deep interdisciplinarity, which the experts noted: ‘The proposal addresses a compelling problem . . . presents an original concept worthy of consideration. . . . My primary question is how the proposed study relates to the problem statement’ (Expert B). And: ‘The team lays out a sound set of research questions and accompanying hypothesis that are only one level above what one might expect from a disciplinary team . . . [It] does not rise to the level of the type of interdisciplinary thinking that can result in a problem reformulation’ (Expert G). By comparison, in addition to being original, the Estuary Group and Potable Water Group proposals were both also considered highly interdisciplinary. We argue that this is because both groups situated their problems, consciously or unconsciously, in a science of complexity. For example, unlike the Mariculture Group, the Estuary Group came to the problem of ‘resilience’ based on a goal of understanding a diverse set of interrelated factors. Thus, rather than seeing ‘resilience’ merely as an abstract concept, the group deployed it as a complex dynamic to metabolize the ecosystem services of an estuary (that is, refugia, recreation, genetic diversity, aesthetics) with human impacts. Similarly, it was the Potable Water Group’s fundamental concern with the relationships between land use, water quality, human health, and human perception that led them to the unexpected problem of ‘potable water’. Not only did the concept of ‘potable water’ bring multiple domains into contact with each other in the problem statement, but the group’s vision of the problem as dynamic and its construction of a multi-level, multivariate research design created a sense of critical interdependence among these domains and yielded a model of interdisciplinary integration. Importantly, we think, both the Estuary and the Potable Water Groups used modeling as a tool to capture and convey the relational structures of their complex systems. In fact, for the Potable Water Group, the model was the ‘boundary object’ that integrated the group’s interactions, dialogue and labor (Star, 1990). The model allowed the group to ‘see’ the problem and then restructure their perspectives to combine knowledge and skills that were otherwise previously divided along disciplinary lines. The following vignette from the group is illustrative in this regard: Student A: There may be several facets of the study handled by researchers from different disciplines, but there needs to be connection and interaction between the various parts and people within the study – between all the multiple layers

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. . . some experimental, some observational, some qualitative. The study does not have to follow only one methodology or examine one issue, but there needs to be connection between the various research questions and researchers. Student A: Are any of you aware of the conceptual frameworks for integration of humans into environments? [After naming several articles, sketches a model on the flipchart ] So, using this model, we could develop testable hypotheses that incorporate other disciplines, a number of hypotheses that speak to a number of disciplines within one framework. Following a discussion in which Student B proposes a multidisciplinary approach with each discipline addressing its disciplinary component of the question, Student A continues, ‘One of the things we’re trying to do is meld the discipline so that we’re not working separately. This is part of what the conceptual framework is meant to do. (Student Quotes, Field Notes, Group D)

Thus, despite the group’s highly disciplinary working style described earlier, the Potable Water Group held up the idea of interdisciplinarity as an end rather than a means, and strategically approached modeling to effectively integrate and synthesize the interdisciplinary relations catalyzed by the dynamic of potable water. Rather than finding these styles and goals at odds with one another, we argue that it was the very disciplinary rigor of the group that concretized and enabled the analysis of these interdisciplinary relations. In the end, it was the strength of the Potable Water Group’s disciplinary components and its ability to envision how these domains and dynamics linked together that won the experts’ praise: The proposal was highly interdisciplinary, encompassing basic ecological and hydrological principles, land use and land cover change, and human social status and perceptions. . . . This was one of the only groups that explicitly considered how changes in ecosystem services might influence human wellbeing, and how that in turn would affect human behaviors and further affect changes in ecosystem function. (Expert A)

The experts noted the same strength in the Estuary Group’s proposal, commending the group for its vision and its well-negotiated balance between disciplinary and interdisciplinary qualities. Although the group had trouble connecting resilience, population growth, refugia and the value of ecosystem services, this was probably the most interesting proposal of all the studies proposed. It was clearly interdisciplinary, and yet rested on a reasonable disciplinary scientific foundation. (Expert C) The group selected the relatively unique framework of resilience for their study. Such a framework offers great strength in that, if treated correctly, it is inherently integrative. . . . The disciplinary methods and techniques brought to bear on the question are very strong, and there was excellent balance between the social and ecological components of the problem. (Expert A)

To our minds, the expert rankings and accompanying commentaries above clearly point to the influence of a group’s interdisciplinary disposition

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in terms of mobilizing a vision of complexity, as well as the importance of a strong grounding in the relevant disciplinary knowledge and skills to model that vision. For a model to work, the input knowledge must be verified and then organized into a structure on the basis of relevance to the situation or problem in question. On the one hand, knowledge verification comes from expertise in disciplinary debates, methods, and theories; on the other, knowledge organization derives both from intuition about and experience with combinatorial operations. As Vygotsky argues, ‘it is this ability to combine elements to produce a structure, to combine the old in new ways that is the basis of creativity’ (2004: 12). And, in Wierzbicki’s view, ‘constructing successful models that represent relevant knowledge is an art’ (2007: 624). It is worth reminding the reader that the Senior IGERT groups, those with advanced interdisciplinary training, ranked in the bottom half (or worse) in terms of both originality and interdisciplinarity. In these groups, we found that overt attention to the deliberative procedures for managing interdisciplinary collaboration did not facilitate and in fact obstructed the groups’ collaborative processes as well as hampered their ability to produce integrative proposals. The emphasis on the procedures of interdisciplinary collaboration was greatest in the Senior IGERT Group B, the Lawn Group, which was the lowest-ranked group in all categories. While the group explicitly called for the integration of proposed ideas, they did so as part of an ongoing discourse about what constitutes an original, integrated and interdisciplinary question, and as part of an overused recourse to rules and strategies (for example, voting, turn taking) for collaboration to generate such a question, rather than as part of charting any intellectual course for actually combining the various propositions of the group. In short, the group’s self-conscious concern with performing interdisciplinary collaboration overshadowed, even occluded, its ability to demonstrate any disciplinary talents. Thus, it seems that while the Lawn Group displayed the actions one might think should accompany collaborative creation (that is, extensive discussion, visible representations), they seemed to lack both the interdisciplinary disposition to imagine an integrative product and the disciplinary skills to construct one. As the observer notes recount: ‘The group was very concerned with interdisciplinarity and making sure each person brought his/her strengths and expertise to the project. However, each was not willing to compromise his or her individual discipline’s methods, which wasted lots of time and prevented consensus. . . . Their presentation was last, so they spent the entire time passing notes and whispering to each other during other groups’ talks. They were strategizing what to say based on the experts’ reaction and questions to the other groups. No other group did this. (Field Notes, Group B)

As we have tried to show, executing the science of complexity, which represents a fundamentally integrated worldview, depends on cultivating the art of creativity. Prerequisite talents for such an art, at least in the context

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of science, include both specific knowledge and skill sets, as well as a certain disposition or intuition about how to assemble them – what Vygotsky calls ‘combinatorial operation of the imagination’ (2004: 12). While Vygotsky contends that imagination is the basis of all creative activity and a factor of experience, he concedes that the integration of ideas depends on one’s ability to assess the web of potential knowledge available to him/her and is a matter of expertise (Vygotsky, 1978, 2004). Thus, beyond asking what is the right balance between disciplinary skills and an interdisciplinary disposition to nurture creativity, our findings raise questions about if and how institutions of higher education can ‘teach’ dispositions and worldviews or intuition and imagination. CONCLUSION The sociological imagination . . . in considerable part consists of the capacity to shift from one perspective to another . . . It is this imagination, of course, that sets off the social scientist from the mere technician. Adequate technicians can be trained in a few years. The sociological imagination can also be cultivated . . . Yet there is an unexpected quality about it, perhaps because its essence is the combination of ideas that no one expected were combinable – say, a mess of ideas from German philosophy and British economics . . . There is a playfulness of mind back [sic] of such combining as well as a truly fierce drive to make sense of the world, which the technician as such usually lacks. (Mills, 1959)

The activities reported here are a small part of a large-scale, multi-level research project that attempts to understand the impacts of a new model of interdisciplinary graduate training on its students, faculty, and institutions. In this article, we specifically asked whether a deliberately structured intervention like the IGERT program can teach creativity and interdisciplinarity. To do so, we outlined a conceptual model for understanding creativity and interdisciplinarity as well as presented the results of our methodical test of that model. Contrary to our expectations, students with advanced training in the non-traditional, interdisciplinary IGERT program did not score highest on our metrics related to collaborative creation (originality) or creative integration (disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity). In fact, these student groups scored amongst the lowest. While there is no immediately obvious pattern amongst the highest scoring groups in terms of stage or type of graduate training, there are very clear and robust commonalities across these groups in terms of what the observers reported about their processes and how the experts ranked their products. In brief summary, our findings suggest that while bisociative thinking may be conducive to collaborative creation, it alone is neither indicative nor predictive of creative integration. Rather, our results suggest that creative integration depends on the inclination to combine previously unrelated ideas

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into new assemblages as well as the capacity to evaluate the ideas both in terms of their individual contributions and their relational complexities. Thus, our findings support the argument that the ability to understand complex relations among things is the key to generating novel concepts, paradigms, and approaches in science (Simonton, 1988). In so doing, however, they clearly demonstrate the combined importance of disciplinary skills and an interdisciplinary disposition to achieving this level of complex understanding, or ‘cognitive complexity’. Cognitive complexity relates to the overall sophistication of one’s inherent approach to thinking and problem-solving as well as her more specific capacity to observe and evaluate phenomena from disparate vantage points simultaneously and symbiotically. Those with high cognitive complexity have not only the preference for but also the competence to view and understand the world in more complex ways than those with less cognitive complexity (Hage, 2006). Recently, Rogers Hollingsworth (2007) has introduced the idea of ‘cognitive complexity’ to conversations about intellectual creativity and scientific discovery. He argues that: ‘Scientists having high levels of cognitive complexity tend to internalize multiple fields of science and have greater capacity to observe and understand the connectivity among phenomena in multiple fields of science. . . . And it is that capacity which greatly increases the potential for making a major discovery’ (Hollingsworth, 2007: 129). Critical to Hollingsworth’s argument is his proposed correlation between a scientist’s level of cognitive complexity and the degree to which she has cognitively internalized scientific diversity. For us and others interested in promoting intellectual creativity and supporting transformative discovery, then, the inevitable next question is how does one best learn, if at all, to internalize scientific diversity and exercise cognitive complexity. As Sill (2001) tells us: ‘Many people in looking for ways to teach creativity direct their focus on freedom, either as freedom to let the subconscious act, freedom from habits of thought, or both. Unfortunately, the relationship between freedom and creativity is frequently over-played with far too much expected from the breaking down of inhibitions along [sic]. Lack of freedom clearly inhibits creativity, but the presence of freedom cannot guarantee it because freedom is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creativity’ (Sill, 2001: 302). Based on the findings here, it is our belief that freedom must be coupled with discipline, with training in and transmission of concepts, methods, and standards – the technical abilities – of domains. C. Wright Mills may be correct that imagination is what sets the scientist apart from the technician. But, just as freedom is to creativity, technical ability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for cognitive complexity and the ability to imagine unusual combinations of ideas. Arguably, it is this very combination of discipline and freedom that the IGERT program set out to accomplish. Thus, while we applaud the IGERT goals, we suggest that its implementation could be adjusted to better achieve

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them. The IGERT program was intended to ‘catalyze a cultural change in graduate education’ and ‘produce creative agents for change’. However, designed as a ‘disciplinary plus’ approach, the program was conceived and executed in a manner that not only accommodates but reflects the institutional processes of normal science and traditional theories of disciplinary knowledge reproduction. As such, those responsible for the program have not taken their own imaginative, let alone active, leap into a new kind of educational dynamic that could best metabolize domain expertise with interdisciplinary experience. We argue an alternative approach to the current ‘disciplinary plus’ model, which essentially asks students to inculcate and ally themselves to multiple domains, might instead engage students deeply in one area of disciplinary expertise while inviting them to participate in intermittent periods of interdisciplinary exposure. The important role that separate domains play in the creative process suggests the need to maintain the integrity of teaching coherent debates, methods, and theories when seeking to encourage integrative thought. However, simply transferring skills and techniques is clearly not enough if we genuinely seek to support creativity and interdisciplinarity. Decades of research suggest that the creative process is most fruitful when periods of ‘work’ are combined with periods of ‘play’ (see, for example, May, 1975; Poincaré, 1952). And more recent work contends that cognitive complexity is enhanced in those who already internalize a proclivity for scientific diversity by engaging in mentally intensive avocations (Hollingsworth, 2007). One way to achieve this balance between what might be called disciplinary vocation and interdisciplinary avocation is to return the charrette to its original purposes and to deploy it as an educational opportunity rather than an experimental methodology. The charrette versus ‘disciplinary plus’ approach to IGERT training would enable the type of domain immersion that yields the necessary technical abilities while also allowing for authentic excursions into scientific diversity and disagreement that would nurture independence from and imagination beyond strict disciplinary orthodoxies. As an experience rather than an experiment, the charrette may not be able to ‘teach’ dispositions and worldviews but it will better exercise the cognitive complexity that stems from scientific diversity and drives intellectual creativity. The results and suggestions presented here should not be taken in any way as a condemnation of the IGERT program but rather utilized to enhance its role in the new field of ‘creativity support’ (Wierzbicki, 2007). What we propose may well require a more radical transformation of higher education, one that reframes old ideas of knowledge reproduction and validation to support newer concepts of knowledge creation and exploration – practices which may not be common to students or faculty of higher education. Thus, we submit this article as both empiricist and heuristic in nature, written in the spirit of reporting provocative results and suggesting radical reforms. Though based on a small sample drawn by self-selection from a population

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with unusual dimensions and formed into groups using a mixture of random assignment and quotas, our results are substantial in magnitude, consistent in direction, and robust to reasonable challenges. Hopefully, others will follow up with similar studies and will subject the findings and views presented here to critical analysis. It is only through the iterative process of proposing new ideas and subjecting them to rigorous testing that we may make fundamental advances in science (Hollingsworth, 2007). Acknowledgement This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation NSF Award 0355353. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We would like to recognize the contributions of our colleagues to the charrette and thus indirectly to this article: Christopher Bail, David Conz, Sarah Damaske, Ingrid Erickson, Lauren Rivera, David Schleifer, and Michelle van Noy.

Diana Rhoten is director of the Knowledge Institutions program area at the Social Science Research Council. Rhoten’s research focuses on the social and technical conditions as well as the individual and organizational implications of different approaches to knowledge production. Much of her recent work in this area concerns the study of interdisciplinary and collaborative practices in science. Examples of her current work can be found in Science, Nature, and Research Policy. She is also now co-editing a book entitled Knowledge Matters: The Public Mission of the Research University. Rhoten’s earlier research takes up comparative analyses of social and educational policies in North and South America. Publications related to this work can be found in journals such as Journal of Education Policy and Comparative Education Review as well as books such as The New Accountability: High Schools and HighStakes Testing. [email: [email protected]]

Erin O’Connor is a Research Associate at the Social Science Research Council, where she began a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in September 2008. In May 2008, she received her PhD in sociology from the New School for Social Research for her dissertation, ‘The Matter of Culture: An Ethnography of Embodied Knowledge in Glassblowing’. Her publications include articles on embodied knowledge, tools, imagination, and innovation in glassblowing. She is currently writing on interdisciplinarity and creativity among young scientists and is planning future research on perception and imagination in the arts, as well as embodied notions of well-being in health practices. [email: [email protected]]

Ed Hackett studies the social organization and dynamics of scientific research, asking how patterns of interaction, leadership, interdisciplinary collaboration, and other factors influence the production of knowledge. His most recent publications can be found in Research Policy and Social Studies of Science. He is also co-editor

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of The New Handbook of Science and Technology Studies and co-author of Peerless Science: Peer Review and U.S. Science Policy. He has written on many other aspects of science, technology, and society, including research misconduct, the scientific career, science and law, university-industry research relations, and environmental justice. [email: [email protected]]

Notes 1. The word ‘charrette’ translates literally from French to English as cart. The term was used by the school of architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris to describe ‘an intense final effort made by architectural students to complete their solutions to a given architectural problem in an allotted time . . .’ (Grove, 1981). The genesis of the term rests in the tradition of faculty assigning design problems so difficult that only a few students could solve them in the time allotted before the ‘charrette’ rolled past the drafting tables to collect the students’ work, completed or not. Today, it refers to an intensive creative process akin to brainstorming that is used primarily by design professionals to develop solutions to a problem within a limited timeframe. We proposed the 19th century concept of the ‘charrette’ to fashion an appropriate experimental test-bed for interdisciplinarity and creativity. 2. In Koestler’s conception (1964), there is a clear distinction between associative and bisociative thought. Associative thought works within the confines of a single domain, whereas bisociative thought works at the intersection of distinctly separate domains. The term ‘bisociative thinking’ or ‘bisociation’ points to the independent, autonomous character of domains that are brought into contact and recombined in the creative act (Koestler, 1964; Sill, 2001). 3. John Dewey often used the term ‘disposition’ as a synonym for habit. Like habits, dispositions are deeply intertwined with cognition and emotion, and they have a primary role as basic building blocks of all our worldviews and actions (Dewey, 1922). 4. The original 15 criteria used by the experts to rate the proposals included: intellectual merit, broader impacts, disciplinary literature, disciplinary knowledge, disciplinary methods, depth, interdisciplinarity, integration, synthesis, breadth, comprehensiveness, proposal formulation, scientific skepticism, rigor, and originality. For each criterion at every level of the five-point scale, experts were given a common detailed verbal description of what was meant by that rating.

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