Against Individual Creativity

In this paper I discuss reasons for viewing creativity more as a social process than as an individual act. These reasons include the subjectivity of evaluation in attributing creativity, the potentially arbitrary relationship between individuals and creativity at the cultural level, the importance of the capacity for preserving cultural information over and above the capacity to innovate, the role of objects, institutions and interaction in sparking creativity, and the social constructedness of creative domains. I discuss these ideas and consider the consequences of this way of thinking for research into computational creativity. I argue that realising the goals of computational creativity depends on integrating research on creative agents with social technologies.