Description and Creativity conference

Approaches to collaboration and value from anthropology, art, science and technology

A conference at King's College, Cambridge

3rd - 5th July 2005

Theme

How does 'Description' relate to 'Creativity'? The issues this conference will address are wider than discovering appropriate descriptions of creative processes as social action. We will investigate the inter-relation of kinds of description and of creativity.

Creativity is something of a ubiquitous term in the contemporary world. From infant education policies to discussions of the value of indigenous culture, from thinking behind Intellectual Property attribution to Government initiatives intended to foster and develop the 'knowledge economy', 'creativity' has come to be a sign of value. For social scientists, an interest in creativity must at some level be to do with setting out (describing) the social and relational aspects of its mechanisms, appearance, and instantiation.

Description figures prominently in approaching creativity. For one thing, it is the starting point for communication among actors. Communication, reliant upon description (successful or not) may be a prerequisite for collaboration as it offers the possibility for different social actors to utilise diverse knowledge and expertise in making novel or innovative interventions. How then do we think of description of social action as different to description of art works, or of the natural world?

Ethnographic description is already theorised, never neutral, and therefore always engaged in one way or another with its subjects and audiences. But such engagement is rarely recognised as such. What would a descriptive social science, concerned with making such engagement an explicit aspect of its reach, look like? And how different is this endeavour to explicitly collaborative projects such as those between artists and scientists, or architects and clients?

Description and creativity are problematic terms. The speakers at the conference are asked to meet these problems head on. With both terms currently in circulation, it seems pertinent to ask questions of each, and of their interrelation, especially in the context of collaborative working. Speakers will look to a variety of instances where description and creativity are allied: be that in relations between anthropologists and their subjects/informants, or of artists and scientists, performers and facilitators, designers and users, originators and commentators.

What are the ancillary or unintended results of description? And can we chart instances where descriptions themselves have been used creatively/as aspects of non-descriptive creative projects? Some might want to distinguish description from related terms (such as translation) because of the 'creativity' built into any description from the outset. Far from being removed from the world, can we theorise how description thus implies engagement? Participation through description relies upon the understanding that description is both theoretically informed, and is always situated.

I hope we can have discussions which open up both the terms to scrutiny, and at the same time, look to make interventions that might reclaim one or both for positive effect.

Some questions that speakers will be asked to think around are:

• How do particular descriptions get taken up and used in ongoing projects, in framing and directing investigation?
• Does it make sense to think of a relational or dispersed creativity when the dominant models we have available tend to locate creativity in individual minds?
• Are we right to see binary code or mathematics as 'description' of the world? What indeed is the interrelation between description and action, or description and generative process? (A question made particularly pertinent when thinking about software, dance and architecture.)
• If creativity is seen in collaborations and innovative combinations, then is the role of description one of making combination possible through agreement about the form of existing and potential knowledge? What of dispute, critique and contradictory descriptions?
• What are the problems a focus on description, an inherently open-ended and enabling enterprise, generate when knowledge must always be made useful and useable?