Read on Twitter
I got to talk with @_adamwiggins_ and @mmcgrana about Collaborative Creativity on their podcast Metamuse! We were talking about how iterating together openly can lead to more innovative and inclusive ways of working together. Check it out! 1/n https://twitter.com/MuseAppHQ/status/1357396206553554944
I’ll use this thread to dive into a few points that we talk about in the show in a bit more detail. If any of this sparks anything with you, feel free to chime in! 2/n
First of, what really *is* Collaborative Creativity? It ultimately just describes the flow of building on top of each other’s ideas in any form. The sea shanties you might have seen recently are actually an amazing example of this! 3/n https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-gb/sea-shanty-tiktok-nathanevanss
And you might have had similar experiences being together with people in a shared digital space, where you have equal access to the shared objects. This allows you to rapidly riff and combine existing thoughts into new ideas. 4/n
This can feel truly magical and I’ve been trying to better understand why this can feel so empowering. My hope is that the better we understand these processes, the better we can design and build tools to support these! 5/n
So let’s take a step back: The core part of all of this is this idea of “Bisociation”. Arthur Koestler described this term in “The Act of Creation” as the underlying pattern of invention and discovery. 6/n
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Creation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Creation
It essentially describes that a new idea, a creative spark, is a connection between two frames of thought, which previously had not been connected and is more than just an association. 7/n
The very intriguing part to me is thinking about how computers can support this process. How can computers help for the right frames to be in the mind at the right time? 5/n
One strategy is through organizing your existing knowledge, so that it's more likely to have access to find and retrieve existing and relevant frames of thought. 6/n
This, maybe the more classical category of “tools for thought” alone is a huge field and there are many exciting things happening with tools like @NotionHQ, @RoamResearch, @coda_hq, or @evernote. 7/n
But the other way to support creativity is based on the Mind <-> Sketch iteration model that Bill Buxton wrote about in "Sketching User Experiences"; That through externalizing your knowledge into an object of some sort, you can take a step back and learn from it. 8/n
This flow of personal iteration is one of the key processes happening every day in @figmadesign. People externalize their ideas to explore, compare, learn, and improve them over time. 9/n
And just thinking about this process alone is already mind boggling to me. Like, where does the knowledge come from? We can gain new knowledge through the pure act of creating something?! Wild. 
10/n
10/n
But another reason why I love this model so much is because it can be easily extended to show different ways of collaborating together. 11/n
When you bring people together into the same space, not only will they be able to learn from other people's creations. But when they can *create* in the same space, too, you can kick off a flywheel of collaborative knowledge creation. 12/n
And I think this is exactly the feeling of what is happening when people get together into a shared space like a Figma file or—in a maybe not so distant future—in front of a real life whiteboard again. 13/n
Collaborative iteration can happen in other ways, too: Structured, e.g., using git in software development, or redundant, e.g., using email (or creating TikToks). All of these are highly valuable ways of working together and just work better in different contexts. 14/n
But one majorly important point: Iterating with others can be scary af. By definition you will be sharing an idea that is not as good as it could be. This can be really intimidating. And the comic below shows another potential downside. (From: https://nedroidcomics.tumblr.com/post/41879001445/the-internet) 15/n
So the culture of working together—or: enabling a culture of failing together—is key! @kelseymwhelan and I gave a talk about this at config last year, if you’re interested to dive deeper. 16/n
There are a ton of more aspects required for a healthy working culture in which ideas can be shared freely and iterated upon with respect for every participant of the process. And there is so much still to do to enable this for more people all over the world. 17/n
But I truly believe that tools can make this shift from ‘my ideas’ to ‘our ideas’ experienceable. And I hope that through tying this directly back to creativity and innovation, teams and companies will be motivated to actively aim for more open and inclusive ways of working. 18/n
So thanks for sticking with me and thanks again to Adam and Mark for having me on the show! It’s such an honor to have been a guest on Metamuse! 
/fin
/fin
