Interview with Prof. Mitchell Resnick
on creativity and computational media.

MIT, Cambridge, Fall 2003
Author: Federico Casalegno, Ph.D
casalegno@mit.edu
http://www.mit.edu/~fca

This interview has been done within the research project on
“creativity and learning”, fall 2003, Design and Fabrication Group @ MIT.

Group web site: http://architecture.mit.edu/projects/dfg
Prof. Terry Knight: http://architecture.mit.edu/people/profiles/prknight.html

Mitchel Resnick is the director of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT - Media Lab. He develops innovative technologies to help people, especially children, to learn in a new and creative way. During this interview we are going to talk about the relationship between creativity and learning, as well as the importance and the use of computational media for creativity. The three key notions that we will investigate concern creativity, learning and computational media.

Federico Casalegno: Can we start this conversation by <asking> how do you consider creativity and how we can develop it?

Mitchel Resnick: For us, we think a lot about the fact that in the root of creativity, that is create. And, in order to really develop <one's> creativity, one needs to develop the ability to create and a lot of times we both express ourselves most creatively and develop our creativity best, when we were in the process of designing things, creating things, inventing things. And I think that’s been at the core of a lot of the work that we do here is - how can we provide new opportunities for people to create? - and then in the process help them develop their creativity and learn new things as they’re designing and creating. I think this comes about because we see a process where when people create things, whether it’s in the physical world or creating things on the computer screen, uh, whether it’s writing a story or building a robot, there are many different things you can create.

FC: What do you mean when you say to “create”?

MR: When I say create, I’m talking about it very broadly. It’s not just a classic - designing a picture - but many different things you can create. I think when you’re in the process of creating something... it’s often taking a model that you have in your mind and playing out that model with a new creation in the world. But as soon as you create something in the world, it’s not necessarily going to live up to exactly the model that you had in your mind. It will disagree in certain ways or surprise you in certain ways. So by creating things in the world, it leads you to revise the models that you have in the mind. And as you revise the models you have in the mind, it leads you to create new things in the world. So I think that we think about this constant cycle back and forth that, taking our ways of thinking about the world and using that to express ourselves and create things in the world, and through that activity of creating, it gives us an opportunity to test out, to try out, to play with the models we have in our mind and continually iterate back and forth between the two.

FC: Which are the reasons why you are interested in new computational material to improve learning and creativity?

MR: I think one reason we’re especially interested in new materials, such as new computational materials, is <that> they expand the range of the things we can create in the world, and therefore can expand the range of ideas we can play out in the world. So it’s both expanding what we can create and the ideas that we can play with through that creating process. And, unfortunately, that’s usually not the way most people think about computers. Too often people think of computers only in terms of getting access to information, and, of course, computers are great for that. And we like to think of computers and digital technology as a new material for creating because we think that’s where it’s going to make the biggest difference. Because we see every time you bring new material into people’s... into their world, into their mind and into their hands, it provides an opportunity for them to explore in new ways, experiment in new ways and play out their ideas in new ways. So we think that’s what’s most important about these new computational media is that - is the way in which it expands that - expands the range what we can create and the types of things we can explore through creating.

FC: How do computational tools expand the learning process, and how can new technologies change how we learn?

MR: If we now have tools that expand what we can design, more and more things can be studied, explored, and experimented with in a design-based way. I think that’s one of the most important ways in which technology can change how we learn but it also changes what it is we learn - certain ideas, certain concepts - that might have been previously very, very difficult to learn, now might become accessible because of the new technology. And some ideas that were previously excluded from the curriculum because they were seen as too difficult - it doesn’t mean that they were unimportant - and it might be very important for the ways people grow up and the things they’ll be doing in the world. But it just wasn’t seen as something that they could manage. And the new technologies sometime can make certain ideas more accessible.

FC: Which roles may these new technologies play?

MR: The new technologies actually play two roles in what we learn. One is they might change what it is that’s important for people to learn <in> the world they’re going to enter in the future. Kids are growing up and living in a world that’ll be different than the world of their parents or grandparents. So that’s one way in which it changes what it is that’s important for them to learn because they’re growing up into a different world. But even beyond that, it’s not just that they’re entering a different world. It could be that there are certain things that would have been important for their parents and their grandparents to learn but weren’t in the curriculum because we didn’t have good ways of helping people learn those things. So it’s not just that it’s helping kids learn new things that are new for tomorrow’s society but it could be learning some ideas that have been around for a long time but just weren’t accessible before.

FC: How do computers support a culture of creativity, and what are the challenges that we face?

MR: First thing, to answer the question, computers can be used in ways that will make certain educational approaches more entrenched in a way that restricts creativity, or restricts creative thinking. So I think that’s one challenge with computers. I think another challenge is <that> even once one adopts a certain education approach of using computers to support experimenting, exploration, expressing oneself, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy to use computers in that way. And in order to support people to learn how to use computers that way, we also need some cultural change. That is not something that we can just give the technology, even if we give technology and give some... and say we think it should be used this way. That doesn’t mean they’ll be easy to start using in that way. Because really learning to use computers to express oneself is something that one develops over time, the way one develops learning a new language, and that doesn’t happen overnight.

And often times learning a new language happens best when you’re surrounded by other people who speak that language, and similarly, learning to express yourself computationally happens best if you’re surrounded by other people who express themselves computationally. And as you start to do it, if you’re surrounded by other people who are already, you know, able to express themselves, they can help you as they do it by giving you support, and advice, and feedback. So in all of those ways being part of a community and a culture that knows how to express themselves computationally is important but often times doesn’t exist.

FC: How critical is the balance between the importance given to the process and the importance given to the final results?

MR: In some educational settings, there is too much focus on just the final result. You take a test, and you’re graded on whether you got the right answer. And of course that loses out all of the richness of what went into creating that answer or final product. Of course, someone who gets the right final answer but doesn’t really understand the process, they’re not learning nearly as much as someone who might have a final result which isn’t as appealing but they really explored the concepts in a rich way. So of course the process is critically important and too often ignored in many educational settings.

On the other hand, we find that one of the best ways for people to engage in a rich process of experimenting and exploring isn’t the process of creating a product. So I don’t want to fully dismiss the importance of the product because the act of creating something is often where you can have the best focus on a process - where you can learn from the process. So the product does play an important role within the process; it becomes intertwined with it. So you don’t want to focus just on the product, but you also... But I think that by thinking about the product you can enrich the process as long as one makes sure that one doesn’t lose sight of the importance of the process.

FC: In which ways are computers different from previous educational material for the creativity process?

MR: I think that one place where computers can play a special role in focusing on the process is that - computers are very good at representing the dynamics of the world. And that’s one way in which computers are very different than many previous materials that we’ve worked with. Different from paper and pencil, blackboard and chalk. Computers can capture dynamics by helping to change over time. And of course process is about dynamics, about change over time, so we can use the computer to represent process. So if we feel that <the> process of creativity is important, and I definitely do, the computer can help capture some of that process. So as you create something, it’s easier to capture the process on a computer, to see how you got from one stage to another, to go back and review different parts of the process. So, the computer can make the process into something tangible. So there’s another blurring of process of product, because the process can become a product with computational media. I think that can be very important.

FC: I was interested in your vision of the creative society. You wrote something [in regards to] switching from the industrial society to the information society, and from the information society to the communication society, and the next step that you were underlining - this idea of a creative society.

MR: I think starting twenty or maybe thirty years ago, people did start talking about the information society because people <were> starting to recognize that information was playing a more critical role to society than ever before. Of course, information has always been important. It was important a hundred years ago and even long before that, but now it’s going to play... There are more ways for people to manipulate, access, transmit, communicate information than before. And partly because of that, information plays a more important role both in economic development and personal development than ever before.

But in my mind, it misses the point that, yes, information is more important than before but sometimes it can be misleading to us if you put too much attention on the role of information. And I think that other people have recognized that as well. In the last ten years many researchers have started to say that, well, in fact information society is not the best way of thinking about our new society. It’s better to think of it as a knowledge society because just having a lot of information out there isn’t going to make a difference and I think people are becoming very personally aware that even when they have access to a lot of information, it doesn’t help them get a better understanding of the world, doing better in their job, <or> understanding themselves better. Just having the information is not enough, but they need to use that information to develop knowledge - for them to have a better understanding of their work, of the world, of themselves. So developing understanding as some of the people have recognized is critically important.

Now I think it’s accurate to say that knowledge is at the core to economic development, not access to natural resources and materials. So I think it’s fair to say that knowledge does play more a central role, and thinking of the society we live in as a knowledge society is true and it’s a better characterization than the information society. And there’s been a lot of work in the past decade about how do we... manage that knowledge? How do we support development of knowledge? And I think that’s all been very good. And I think even the knowledge society doesn’t capture what is most important about the transition taking place now, and what’s going to be most important, looking into the future. That’s because in my mind, success in the future - whether it’s for an individual, for a community, for a company or for a society at large - success is more on our ability, not just what we know, but our ability to think and act creatively with the things that we know.

FC: A final point concerning the use of ecological strategies to solve design problems.
This hypothesis of ecological thinking shows the importance of the community and the environment in the solving of problems, and [also, in]creating and finding creative solutions to solve problems.

MR: I think this is another transition we’re going through. I think in the industrial society and even times before, there was a belief that the best way of solving many problems was in a very centralized way - for someone to come up with a solution and disseminate that solution. And some things can be dealt very well in that fashion of having someone who’s an expert come up with an idea and then other people carry it out. I think increasingly - especially as the world becomes more complex and more rapidly changing - more and more often it’s going to be important for us to deal with problems in a very different way, in a way that brings lots of people together and draws on that expertise of many different people. Someone once described this as leveraging the small efforts of the many rather than the large efforts of the few. So what we do is to get lots of people contributing together towards a solution as oppose to a small number of people <who> come up with a solution and distributing it to the many.

FC: Many thanks.