Exploring the Potential of Art Workshop: An Attempt to Foster People’s Creativity in an Online Environment

Abstract

Recently, the importance of creativity in society has been clearly recognized. Furthermore, educational practices through art, such as the STEAM paradigm, are being implemented gradually. However, the framework of how creativity should be fostered through art has not been sufficiently discussed. Based on studies of artists’ creative expertise, this study proposed a framework for fostering creativity through art. In addition, we conducted a year-long art program based on this framework in an online environment and investigated its effects. As a framework, we proposed the importance of long-term support for the dynamic development of participants’ creativity. We mainly focused on the following four components: active interaction with objects and the environment through bodily action, active interaction with others and their works (inspiration), exploration in creative processes (exploration), and promotion of intrinsic motivation and decrease in creativity anxiety (motivation). After a total of eight workshops over a year, we observed improvements in the participants’ creativity anxiety, divergent thinking skills, images of art and creation, and openness to others. We discussed the effectiveness of the proposed framework and the advantages and limitations of using an online environment.

A Black Mirror of Bright Ideas: Could Media Educate towards Positive Creativity?

“…This solution is also promising for the development of creativity. Online interventions are effective in shaping creative skills and related characteristics, as evidenced in an art workshop series [74]. Such effects might extend to large-scale creative collaboration and co-creation when considering theoretical literature that emphasizes the distributed nature of creativity in online environments [60], and case studies like r/place that revealed how certain aspects like community organization unravel during a creative project.…”

“…Consequently, users would soon form communities to realize their common goal of creative activity: they started painting together, while also competing with other users (communities) for contested spots within the canvas. On a smaller scale, online art workshops were shown to lead to higher openness for others and their opinions, lower creativity anxiety, higher prevalence of pursuing everyday creative activities, and creative potential [74], underlining the potential of such interactive settings in online environments as a source for creative learning.…”

“…As such, r/place not only showcases what forms of digital creativity may look like under the joint effort of hundreds of thousands, but the historic timeline yields an impression of the creative process in such settings. As a downside, such free-for-all environments may not value artistic quality, contrary to more explicit settings, e.g., [74], but instead appraise community-related value (i.e., an artwork that better reflects the interests of a community may have higher odds of persisting as opposed to an artwork of higher artistic quality that is at odds with the shared belief of what the platform is about).…”

The possibilities of disruption: Serendipity, accidents and impasse driven search

“…Take for example, combinatorial creativity. The cognitive load of combining different objects mentally is enough that while it may be that the imagination would function better without the associated constraints of reality, in a combinatorial task having actual objects to play with inspires people to create more creative products (Shimizu & Okada, 2021). Playing with the real means that combinations which have no roots in memory or experience can be generated and these may break creative fixation (Valle´e-Tourangeau et al, 2011).…”

Capítulo 6. Con la creatividad por las nubes: Docencia y creatividad en el Cloud Class

“…En la siguiente fase, compartir, los participantes se reúnen en salas más pequeñas para trabajar en grupos de unos seis estudiantes. Si los es-tudiantes pueden ver varias pantallas al mismo tiempo (como se puede hacer con el software de videochat Zoom), generan más ideas (Shimizu et al, 2021). En la última fase, reflexión, los participantes vuelven a la sala principal y comparten lo que han aprendido.…”