Hi!
My name is Vlad Kolzeev.
I'm a PhD student at The Business School formerly known as Cass and soon to be known as Bayes.
My research interests lie at the intersection of creativity, human-computer interaction
and clinical psychology.
The main goal of my PhD is the development of a digital intervention that will provide
process-specific emotional and motivational support to creators during long-term projects.
This work is responding to several calls made in the literature, some of which are very
recent.
First, to expand understanding and support of creativity beyond divergent thinking and
idea generation.
Second, to understand mobility in and as creativity.
And, finally, to explore the role of emotional abilities in the navigation of complex creative
work.
To do this, I'm largely drawing on two theories.
First, the sociocultural theory of creativity which argues that creativity arises out of
the interactions between the creator and their environment and specifically through the utilisation
of novel affordances.
Second is the Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory of Personality which explains human personality
and emotion from the perspective of “rewards” and “punishments”, positive and negative
stimuli, which are navigated by approach and avoidance neural systems.
How do these two come together?
The main theoretical assumption here is that objects, physical and cultural, in the external
world afford for both novel uses and rewarding internal states.
However, utilising either is likely to not be straightforward, thus leading to emotional
responses and associated regulation needs.
For example, the Rubik’s cube affords, by design, for satisfaction that comes from solving
it via a small C pathway.
However this is far from guaranteed and emotional reactions produced by the interaction might
well be different.
What about a practical example close to home for a lot of us?
Let's take a set of academic papers as the "object”.
It might be approached based on the possibility of a rewarding state, such as satisfying one's
curiosity, but once that happens, there are several factors to consider.
One is direction.
The outcome of the process depends highly on the affordances chosen.
Extracting a novel theoretical combination to write an essay would result in academic
creativity.
Plotting the age of the papers in years to create an abstract shape would lead to a very
different creative domain, a visual one.
This one is for the references in my paper.
The second factor is progress or movement through this extraction process.
Anything but the most trivial level of involvement is likely to create at least some "uncomfortable"
situations in which the path towards either the affordance or the rewarding state is unclear
or blocked by resistance from the environment.
Practically, this means that a large proportion of the creative process is spent in a state
of conflict, goal or otherwise.
Time spent interacting with incomplete products, weak arguments and poor decorations, hence
the mixed emotional landscape of the creative process and the recent interest in emotional
regulation.
How can these conflicted states be supported?
Once this framework for approach, avoidance and interaction patterns within the process
is developed, it will be studied empirically using the Creative Process Report Diary with
professional creators to determine possible support mechanisms.
Participants are likely to be electronic music producers, sound artists and other individual
digital creatives as this will allow to integrate the developed tools into their primary workspace.
The digital CRD tool used for data collection will be expanded to include support features.
These are expected to fall into categories based on their theoretical classification,
such as approach issues that would constitute motivational problems, and avoidance issues
which are likely to be connected to feelings of anxiety and uncertainty.
Thank you for your time and I look forward to participating in the Graduate Student Symposium.