Collective creativity: toward a new paradigm for creative culture

Our society is experiencing a paradigm shift that we value from mass produced products to personal and customized product. The shift is also observed with mass media that increases number of channels to reflect wide variety of personal interests. End-users are also starting to be connected by the network, forming online communities to share personal interests. Furthermore, end-users are beginning to create and share content from snap shots of ideas found in daily life. Current popular online services such as You Tube, Flickr, and SNS rely on end-user contribution and collaboration. Through this shift, an emerging topic in the design disciplines called collective creativity has surfaced. [3]

Collective creativity is an approach of creative activity that emerges from the collaboration and contribution of many individuals so that new forms of innovative and expressive art forms are produced collectively by individuals connected by the network. Many related researches on collective creativity focus on the importance of collaboration in the work environment to solve complex and interdisciplinary problems. [1, 2] We adopt the concept of collective creativity to solicit emerging genre of content that continuously grow as more individuals contribute to the activitiy.

An example of content that reflects the concept of collective creativity is a pervasive game "Ototonari". It collectively creates music by walking around the field and interacting with multiple users in the field. [4] "Ototonari" creates a sound based on the position, proximity and density of the user in the field using mobile ad hoc network. The field is divided into sub area, and each sub area has unique sound. By picking up the sound in different area, each user can build one's own music. Once the music is created, the music can be saved to remain in the sub area. Other users can visit the sub area to pick up the music that was saved. Through physical location, sound clips can be shared and thus collectively create music.

"Mopie" is another example of content that shows the strength of collective creativity. In "Mopie", people walk around the city with video-enabled cell phones with GPS unit. The cell phone captures both the video clip of the street scenery and the location data, and these data are sent and archived in the database. Each video clip can be mapped onto the street map. People can have a virtual city walking experience by tracing the street map with a finger or a mouse. The video clip of the selected street is searched from the database and played. If multiple video clips are needed to continue walking, the system automatically loads appropriate clips and seamlessly plays the clip. The video clips archived in the database are contributions by many individuals, at different time and season. Collectively, the "Mopie" city walking experience becomes rich and memorable.