EANU

V L A D P E T R E G L AV

Special Issue on Connecting Theory, Research, and Practice in

the Psychology of Creativity

Creativity as a Sociocultural Act

ABSTRACT
The present article introduces, develops, and illustrates a perspectival framework for
the creative process drawing on current developments within the cultural psychology of
creativity and the social theory of George Herbert Mead. The creative process is conceptualized as a form of action by which actors, materially and symbolically, alone and in
collaboration with others, move between different positions and, in this process, imaginatively construct new perspectives on their course of action which afford greater reflexivity
and the emergence of novelty. The article begins by locating this approach within a
broader conception of distributed creativity and the role of differencesocial, material,
and temporalfor creative expression. It then outlines four key premises of the perspectival framework before illustrating it with the help of a subjective camera study of a painters creative activity. In the end, some important questions are raised concerning the
theoretical and practical implications of this new model.

Keywords: cultural psychology, distributed creativity, difference, perspective, position,

reflexivity, George Herbert Mead, subjective camera, painting.
Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own
culture; and it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is immensely important
for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her
understandingin time, in space, in culture. For one can not really see ones own
exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help;
our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they
are located outside us in space and because they are others.
(Bakhtin, 1986, p. 7)
For Bakhtin (1986) creative understanding requires other people. The person alone is
never enough mainly because the person is fundamentally rooted in her own space, time,
and immediate cultural horizon. Creating involves a form of detachment or distantiation
This article is part of a special issue on Connecting Theory, Research, and Practice in the Psychology of Creativity, guest edited by Ai Girl Tan. This special issue emerged after a symposium on Creativity chaired by Beth Hennessey at the American Psychological Association Convention in year 2014 (Division 10).
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The Journal of Creative Behavior, Vol. 49, Iss. 3, pp. 165180 2015 by the Creative Education Foundation, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/jocb.94

Creativity as a Sociocultural Act

from ones own position in the world to see themboth ones position and the world
from a new perspective: the perspective of others.
For the past decades the psychology of creativity has been actively trying to incorporate this social dimension in an otherwise individual-focused area of study. From the
emergence of a social psychology of creativity (Amabile, 1996; Hennessey, 2003) to sociologically looking systems models of this phenomenon (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 1988), conceptualizing the role of others in creative work has been a continuous challenge for both
epistemological and methodological reasons. Epistemologically, a pervasive separation
between self and other, ego and alter (Markova, 2003), makes researchers frame their
questions in terms of how the two interact (i.e., how the presence or role of others
affects the persons creative expression) instead of starting from a view of the two as
interdependent. This latter position is not only difficult to theorize within a positivist
paradigm (see Runco, 1999), but also challenging to approach methodologically considering the fact that the most popular methods in the psychology of creativity (psychometric
tests and experiments) narrowly target individual creative outcomes.
In search of new theoretical and methodological solutions, the cultural psychology of
creativity (Gl
aveanu, 2010a,b; Gl
aveanu, Gillespie, & Valsiner, 2014) takes relationships
as its unit of analysis instead of isolated individuals. This tradition builds on the foundational scholarship of theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, John Dewey, and Lev Vygotsky. In particular, Vygotskys work (Vygotsky, 1991, 2004) has been inspirational for
researchers who focus on creative collaboration, primarily in the area of human development and education (Moran & John-Steiner, 2003). My own first attempts to theorize the relation between self and other within creative activity have also been guided
by the Vygotskian conception of internalization and externalization processes (e.g.,
Gl
aveanu, 2011), linking creators, audiences, and new artifacts. However, despite
emphasizing the crucial developmental role of others in this dynamic (see for instance
the zone of proximal development), this line of theory does not make fully explicit
the fact that what is being internalized is not only cultural content but also the perspective of others in relation to it.
In this paper, my aim is to expand our cultural psychological understanding of the
creative process by engaging with the key notion of perspective as developed by George
Herbert Mead (1934, 1938) and neo-Meadian scholarship (Gillespie, 2005, 2006a; Martin,
2005a,b; Martin & Gillespie, 2010) and, in doing so, to develop a perspectival framework
of creativity that challenges individualist and mentalist (inside the head) conceptions
of this phenomenon. In what follows, I will locate this new framework, outline its premises, and illustrate it with the help of a subjective evidence-based ethnography (Lahlou,
2011) of a painters activity.

THE WE-PARADIGM, CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY, AND DISTRIBUTED

CREATIVE ACTION
The perspectival framework of the creative process is deeply rooted in the cultural psychology of creativity and reflects a broader We type of paradigm (see Gl
aveanu, 2010a,b).
In contrast to individual-based paradigms of creativity (such as the paradigm of the genius
the He-paradigmand the paradigm of the creative personthe I-paradigm), this view
brings social interaction, communication and collaboration to the fore. From its standpoint, creativity takes place within, is constituted and influenced by, and has consequences
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for, a social context (Westwood & Low, 2003, p. 236). It is important to note here that,
despite its overt emphasis on the social dimension of creativity, the We-paradigm is not
only social but also material (Tanggaard, 2013). In fact, the core idea of the cultural psychology of creativity is that of distributed creative action (see Gl
aveanu, 2014). Against
centric models that reduce creativity to intra-psychological variables (e.g., divergent
thinking, openness to experience, neurological correlates), the notion of distribution makes
it a fundamentally relational and developmental phenomenon. The creative process cannot
be represented by the almost instantaneous, mental, and individual moment of getting the
creative idea, but necessarily engages selfother, symbolicmaterial, and pastpresent
future relations that turn it into a social, embodied, and temporal act.
To capture the complexities of creativity as a psycho-socio-material process, we need a
shift in both paradigm and terminology. I have previously argued (see Gl
aveanu, 2013)
for a re-writing of the classic language of the discipline from the static and disjointed
framework of personprocessproductpress (Rhodes, 1961) to the dynamic and
inter-related actoraudienceactionartifactaffordance. This five As framework
goes beyond a conceptual organizer or analytical tool and should be understood in
its dynamic unfolding over time within each creative situation. Figure 1 below offers a
representation of the 5 As framework focused on the temporal organization of creative
action, symbolically depicted as a continuous line that relates, at each moment, the actor
and emerging artifact. The path of creative action is contingent on both interactions with
different audiences (e.g., collaborators, critics, colleagues) and with the material environment (what the environment affords in terms of current and future action). Highlighting within this figure the three lines of distribution discussed abovetemporality,

AUDIENCE

ACTION

ARTIFACT

ACTOR

FIGURE 1. Creative action: A cultural psychological framework.

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Creativity as a Sociocultural Act

sociality, and materialitywe can observe: (a) the temporal dynamic inscribed within
creative action, which has both a history and is constantly oriented toward the future;
(b) the social axis articulating the perspective of the actor and that of the audience on
the creative artifact; as well as (c) the capacity to engage, both physically and symbolically, with the materiality of the world from this double perspective of self and other.
In fact, it is this last point that requires further explanation as it is indeed crucial for
understanding the essence of creativity as a sociocultural phenomenon.
Human action is intrinsically creative (Joas, 1996) because, at each point in time, it is
embedded within a horizon of possibility. This space of possibility, however, is also, at
all times, constrained (by our intentions, by physical affordances, by cultural norms;
Gl
aveanu, 2012a). Therefore, in most situations of our everyday life, we are faced with a
relatively predictable future in terms of the things we do and the way we interact with
others or use objects; this generates a set of expectations about the social and material
reality we inhabit. Such predictability defines the space of the conventional which is
symbolically depicted in Figure 1 as the relatively narrow tunnel of options emerging
from the artifact. This leaves open the question of how novelty emerges and expands our
horizon of possibility. In line with the cultural psychological theory briefly outlined
above, I propose that it is precisely because there is always a position exterior to the
creative actor (that of an audience) that we are capable of imagining and pursuing new
action pathways afforded by our environment.1 Fundamental for understanding this
process is the notion of perspective.

CREATIVITY AND DIFFERENCE: THE KEY NOTION OF PERSPECTIVE

To develop perspectives one requires difference or, in more dynamic terms, differentiation. What a perspective does is effectively bridge difference by relating two previously
separate positions.
Social, cultural, and developmental psychology, more or less explicitly, begin their
theorizing with the difference between person and world and the processes of mediating
this difference in the transition from an egocentric to a multi-perspectival understanding
of self and others (what Piaget, 1954, referred to as the process of decentration). The
emergence of the symbolic function plays a key role in this transition. It is crucial for the
development of higher mental abilities (Vygotsky, 1997) and, undoubtedly, it is the basis
for the childs first creative acts (Gardner, 1982; Vygotsky, 2004; Winnicott, 1971). The
capacity to use symbols opens up the possibility of detachment from the here-and-now
of perception and makes human action flexible. If the child or adult would be necessarily
bound to her position in and perception of the world then all her action would be more
or less mechanically determined by external stimulations. Humans, however, break this
direct circuit between stimulus and response with the help of symbolic constructions
such as memories of the past, imaginations of the possible, and anticipations of the
future. In this sense, symbolic means regulate our engagement with and experience of
the world (Valsiner, 2000, 2007) above and beyond immediate stimulations from our
1

Interactions with other people may also end up narrowing rather than expanding our area of possibility, particularly when others impose their views on us. It is therefore important not to romanticize the role of the social
for creativity but understand the fact that this role is constitutive to creative acts since, whatever the
consequences of social interaction might be, it establishes the kind of difference that makes perspective taking
possible.

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environment. They expand our proximal experience of the world by opening up distal
experiences, inaccessible to perceptionthe world of the past, of the future, of other
people, of generalized meanings, etc. (Zittoun & Gillespie, 2015a,b).
There are, in sum, three types of differences that are fundamental for creative expression (for details see Gl
aveanu, 2015a; Gl
aveanu & Gillespie, 2014): the difference between
self and other, between symbols and objects, and between past, present, and future (all
closely related to the three lines of distribution mentioned in the previous section). There
will always be a disjunction between my and your perception and understanding of the
world, between a symbol and the object or class of objects it designates, between memories of the past, experiences of the present, and anticipations of the future. In themselves,
however, all these differences or disjunctions are a necessary but not sufficient condition
for creativity. What defines creative action is not only realizing the difference between
my position and your position, for instance, but the capacity to move between these
orientations and integrate or coordinate them in the creation of a new understanding or
object that is significant for both self and other.
In other words, the essence of creativity, from a sociocultural standpoint, relates to
the capacity to manage difference by moving between perspectives (Gl
aveanu, 2015b).
But what exactly is a perspective? The notion of perspective has a long history (for
details see Martin, Sokol, & Elfers, 2008). For George Herbert Mead, the perspective
is the world in its relationship to the individual and the individual in his relationship
to the world (Mead, 1938, p. 115). This relational nature of a perspective becomes
manifest for Mead in the way people effectively act in and on the world. Neo-Meadian
scholarship therefore stresses precisely the fact that perspectives are action orientations (Gillespie, 2006a, p. 17), perceptual and conceptual orientations to a situation
with a view to acting within that situation (Martin, 2005b, p. 231). In this sense, just
as Jack Martin and colleagues (Martin et al., 2008) note, perspectives are neither the
product of individuals, nor something people have, but rather what they develop or
construct (and, in this sense, perspective taking is, ultimately, perspective making).
Reversely, the reality as perceived by the person will always bear the mark of ongoing
action. Reality is inherently perspectival (see also Sch
utz, 1945) and each one of us
inhabits a certain (first-person) perspective within it but, and this is crucially important, we are not trapped within this one perspective. On the contrary, we come to
develop (multi)perspectival selves (Martin, 2005a,b). Our very existence as social beings
is thus understood by Mead as a process of differentiating and coordinating
perspectives in (inter)action.
From the above, it becomes obvious that perspective making and taking are very relevant processes for creativity and, indeed, they have been theorized so far in relation to
the development of agency (see Gillespie, 2012; Martin & Gillespie, 2010). As Alex Gillespie and Jack Martin acknowledge, these processes are closely related to the emergence of
novelty in action and thought.
For example, a cup of coffee is usually part of a perspective oriented to mental
stimulation, but, if one is working outside on a windy day, then, the cup of coffee
can emerge as a paper-weight. This emergence, Mead would argue, is genuine and
not simply an expression of an essential quality of the cup (namely its weightiness).
The fact that the cup can stop the papers blowing away constitutes the weightiness
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of the cup. If the cup existed within relations for which weight was of no
consequence, then weight would not be a quality of the cup. Equally, new aspects
of the cup are likely to arise when the cup enters into new and hitherto
unimagined relations (imagine the cup as a gift to aliens who perceive it as a ritual
object). Within human interaction, which entails the interaction of perspectives,
emergence is relatively common.
(Martin & Gillespie, 2010, pp. 256257)
In other words, perspectives make previously unperceived affordances salient and,
when two (or more) different perspectives intersect, novel meanings and uses of objects
ensue (although whether the person will necessarily go on to act on these to create something depends on the situation). We could equally conceptualize all the above in terms
of divergent thinking or ideation and, indeed, the task of finding alternative uses for
objects has long been part of testing divergent thinking (Guilford, 1950; Torrance, 1966).
However, there is an important difference between divergent thinking theories and perspectival approaches to creativity. The first assume ideas come up in the mind through
the combination or association of pre-existing knowledge. The second locates these
ideas in the perspective or action orientation of a person in the world and considers
both their origin and dynamic as fundamentally social. When dealing with a creative
problem we can assume that people start associating ideas but such cognitive explanations dont do justice to the richness of these moments in which the person experiences
a kaleidoscopic flash of alternative possibilities, alternative pasts and futures, and alternative social perspectives (Martin & Gillespie, 2010, p. 257).

A PERSPECTIVAL MODEL OF CREATIVE ACTION

Building on the above, my proposition in this article is that creative acts involve
adopting and coordinating two or more different perspectives on the same issue or problem and, as a result, expanding our action possibilities in relation to that particular issue
or problem. At present, very few studies focus on this theoretical angle (e.g., Falk &
Johnson, 1977; Grant & Berry, 2011; Hoever, van Kinippenberg, van Ginkel, & Barkema,
2012; Parker, Atkins, & Axtell, 2008) and the ones that do explore primarily the context
of group creativity and narrowly define perspective taking as putting oneself in the place
of the other. Moreover, perspective taking is a variable among others rather than a theoretical notion used to reconceptualize creative action. The latter path is taken here, a
path built around four central premises.
Premise 1. In any given situation there are a multitude of perspectives that can be
adopted toward the same reality (object, person, event, etc.). As mentioned before, the
notion of perspective is far from designating divergent cognitive orientations in the situation; perspectives, on the contrary, refer to the action-based relation between actor and
environment and, in this sense, perspectives are essentially action orientations. For
instance, using a brick as building material and as a weapon are not simply two ideas
about the brick but represent two different action orientations developed in relation to
the brick based on the possibility of building something versus attacking/defending oneself. It should be noted that, most often, we tend to think of a brick as building material
or, in other words, we more easily adopt a conventional perspective (exploit its canonical affordances; Costall, 2014), in line with traditional societal uses learned through
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socialization. Creative action emerges precisely when we are able to move (imaginatively and/or practically) from this conventional perspective to alternative ones. What is
interesting here is the fact that conventionality itself varies from society to society and
even person to person as cultures are never fully prescriptive about the use of symbolic
and material artifacts. Equally, the acquisition of conventional uses of objects has both a
sociogenetic and ontogenetic history (for an exploration of conventionality in early childhood see Moro, 2011).
Premise 2. The perspectives adopted have interactive, embodied origins as they are
grounded in different positions in the social and material world. A perspective is never a
view from nowhere, but it is expressive of the actual position of the person in the
world. This position can be conceptualized at different levels: from ones location in
space (that gives the person a particular viewpoint) to the role one plays in a given situation (e.g., a manager and an employee might have diverging perspectives on one and the
same issue). Most differences in perspective derive from differences in social positions
broadly defined as functional positions within institutionalized patterns of interaction
(Gillespie, 2006a, p. 17). As social beings, our actions are typically integrated within
systems of activity that have a social history and articulate positions, often in a dyadic
form (e.g., parent and child, doctor and patient, and seller and buyer). We frequently
take a new perspective imaginatively as, for instance, it is rare for someone to actually be
a doctor and patient at the same time. And yet, developmentally, the origin of such symbolic movements can be traced in play episodes in which children physically adopt, in
turn, different positions (they can be a doctor and then a patient, and do this repeatedly;
see Gillespie, 2006b). Position exchange theory (Gillespie, 2012; Gillespie & Martin,
2014) bridges the symbolic and the embodied by convincingly arguing that, ontogenetically, perspective taking is not a purely mental but social and physical act.
Premise 3. Formulating and taking new perspectives involves adopting positions of
others in relation to the situation. In other words, it involves becoming an audience to
ones own action and thus decentering from the singular actor perspective. This premise
has been eloquently outlined by Dewey in his discussion of artists:
Even when the artist works in solitude all three terms are present [work, artist and
audience]. The work is there in progress, and the artist has to become vicariously
the receiving audience. He can speak only as his work appeals to him as one
spoken to through what he perceived. He observes and understands as a third
person might note and interpret.
(Dewey, 1934, p. 111)
Creators are simultaneously audiences of the creations of others and they are also the
first audiences of their own creativity (Gl
aveanu, 2011). The capacity to consider ones
situation from positions different than ones own builds on the selfother difference
(see previous section) and reflects the human ability to distantiate from the here-andnow of a (first-person) perspective and re-signify reality. Perspective taking does not
imply the fact that the self becomes the other in literal terms but that, based on previous
social experience, we become capable to think and act in the world as another would.
Adopting a new position and developing a new perspective typically requires an imaginative leap (or loop; Zittoun & Cerchia, 2013; Zittoun & de Saint-Laurent, 2014),
enabling the actor not only to become audience to her own creations but also to return
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to her original position and articulate (in a reflective manner) the two (or more) different perspectives.
Premise 4. Moving between perspectives makes the difference between positions productive
for creative action. It is not enough, generally, to imaginatively and/or physically adopt a
new position for novelty in action to emerge. The actor needs to connect, through a
reflective turn, the new and existing perspective(s) in ways that highlight difference and
reveal its usefulness. Mead discussed the key role of reflexivity for developing an
understanding of the self and, for him, self-reflection relied on the capacity to become
other to oneself (Gillespie, 2006a). What I stress here, for our discussion, is the fact that
adopting a new (other or audience) perspective on ones action does not only lead to a
different understanding of the self but also of the action of the self and its outcomes. It
can foster the emergence of a meta-position (see Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010)
from which a person reflects, at once, on the difference between and the role of multiple
perspectives within a given situation. Developing a meta-position type of perspective is a
condition of possibility for creative action but it does not mean that it will necessarily
lead to creative outcomes (see also the concluding section) and, equally, creative action
might occur in the absence of reflexivity per se (see habitual creativity, Gl
aveanu, 2012b).
And yet, conscious reflective turns, even if they do not occur at the moment of action
but only later and/or with the help of others, remain central for the perspectival model
of creativity outlined here (see also de Saint-Laurent & Gl
aveanu, 2015).
The four premises above are reflected in the updated cultural framework of creative
action depicted in Figure 2. This framework conceptualizes the creative process as a form
of action by which actors, materially and symbolically, alone and in collaboration with others, move between different (audience) positions and, in this process, imaginatively construct
new perspectives on their course of action and its resulting artifacts which afford greater
reflexivity and the emergence of novelty. This process, I hypothesize, takes place both in
the microgenesis of creative action, when perspective taking and reflective turns happen
in a quick succession, a cycle we are barely aware of, as well as in the long-term creation
of visibly new artifacts. The perspectival model applies to both historical and personal
forms of creativity (Boden, 1994). To illustrate these processes more concretely, I
will briefly analyze the dynamic between perspective taking and reflective turns within a
painters artistic activity.

PERSPECTIVISM AND REFLEXIVITY IN PAINTING

The perspectival framework outlined before is a theoretical proposal with considerable
implications for creativity research and practice. Beyond conceptualizing, from a social
standpoint, the creative act, this framework offers us the possibility of analytically studying it in concrete contexts by observing the positions and perspectives involved and the
consequences of moving between them for creative action. To briefly illustrate this, I will
focus in this section on data collected from a London-based painter who agreed to
participate in a subjective evidence-based ethnography (SEBE; see Lahlou, 2011) of his
creative process. In the future, this kind of research should be expanded to include more
painters and also creators from various other domains.
The methodology involves the participant using a subjective camera, a small video
and audio recording device placed at eye-level that captures activity from a first-person
perspective. The recording is then discussed with the participant during a follow-up
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ACTION

ARTIFACT

ACTOR

FIGURE 2. Creative action: A perspectival model.

interview to explore cognitions and emotions at the time of the activity. This is preferred
to using a think-aloud protocol because the latter tends to interfere with the thinking
and action of the person (which does not mean that future studies should not explore
this technique as well). SEBE has been previously applied in the field of creativity to folk
art (see Gl
aveanu & Lahlou, 2012) and it is highly relevant here considering that it offers
both an opportunity to observe creative action from the perspective of the actor and to
have the actor discuss it later on from the position of an audience. The particular set of
data I refer to below includes a pre-interview with the artist about his general trajectory,
the subcam material recorded over a period of 2 weeks while working on a new painting,
and the post-interview conducted with Saadi Lahlou, focused on subcam clips. The
analysis benefited from follow-up discussions with both Saadi Lahlou and Alex Gillespie.
For some background information, the participant was a middle-aged artist living and
working in London who initially started his career as an architect and continued as a
self-taught painter. Influenced by the work of William Turner, the participant was exclusively, at the time of the study, a landscape painter, depicting, mainly in oil, large nonfigurative images on canvas. In his own words, you wont really find anything in my
painting thats been manmade, its all land scene and sky, totally natural. He used
multiple tools to paint these suggestive landscapes, including different types of brushes,
knives and even newspaper sheets and his own fingers. The participant painted primarily
during the day (needed natural light) and often had music (classical, orchestral) playing
in the background. He exhibited mainly in the United Kingdom, but had also been asked
to contribute paintings to international exhibitions.
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The participant described his own process of painting as experimental, based on

layering, meaning the application of oil in different work sessions leaving time
(a few days) for the oil to dry in between. In the pre-interview, he presented his activity
as follows:
When I begin a painting there is no image, no image at all. (. . .) And then I would
start, I would put on my palette a few colours that I would like to start with. And
very loosely with a big brush I would just start to paint, very loosely. (. . .) And I
work just very quickly for probably 20 minutes and cover the canvas as much as
possible, then Ill sit back and stare at it (. . .) and then things will start to appear.
It would be, possibly, just a shape, which I like the look of, which I can then
develop, it could be a ridge of a hill or it could be a whatever, it could be a certain
cloud that is starting to form, and then Ill start to build on that and see where it
goes. And after a few days of building on that I would look at it, I am always
looking at it, but I would look at it quite in-depth and then Id stare at it again
and then I might see something else that [makes me] want to go into that
direction or I might keep going in the same direction. But it is just a creative
process that starts to build with actually nothing set in stone.
The general dynamic described above is not unique for this painter and it describes
indeed an experimental (as opposed to conceptual) type of creator (see Galenson, 2006),
one who continuously perfects her style and artistic vision. The shift between painting
and observing the outcome is also well documented in the literature, from the seminal
work of Dewey who theorized it in terms of doing and undergoing (Dewey, 1934) to
more recent accounts by Mace and Ward (2002). The artists work is marked by a close
dialogue with the emerging artifact, immersed in doing at times while allowing himself
to step back as well and observe the consequences of his actions and be inspired by them.
Again in the words of the participant, its sort of like the paint then has a mind of its
own to a degree because, yes, I am stirring it, but I am only stirring it to some extent;
the imagination is stirring it but the whole thing is a process which is evolving and. . .
(. . .) And then there is the question of standing back and looking at it. In the conceptual terms of the perspectival framework, the artist proceeds by moving between two
(equally physical and imaginative) positions: that of the actor painting (close to the canvas, applying color and enjoying the movement and the feel of the paint) and that of
an outside observe, an audience looking back at what is done (a bit further from the canvas, adopting an evaluative position). How does this movement take place at a microgenetic level? The subcamera recording and post-interview shed light on this important
aspect.
The alternation between actor and audience positions is captured in Figure 3 below.
This snapshot is used here simply for illustration purposes and further analyses can identify similar moments at different stages of painting. The artist, watching this segment of
the recording, commented it in the following way:
Yes, see, thats what Im saying, see when Ive put that paint on there and then
I got kind of quite a nice image first time. It was like spreading butter [smiles] and
then it went across and then I realised it was the way I wanted it and then I went
over the second time and destroyed it. But you know you get so happy with doing
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the actual movement that you think. . . Oh, Ive destroyed it because I went over
it twice. But the first time I went over I actually quite liked that, then the second
time I went over I lost it. And I probably thought to myself why did I do that?
I should have left it. . . Its kind of funny! [laughs] I am slowing down now, I am
slowing down, I screwed that bit up so. . . I am trying to blend, I am trying to
blend. . . Ive got too much of a straight line, it is going too straight. I am going in
for some brown now because Ive got to get that tone which is in the colour
behind it.
In this passage, we have an illustration of how creative action and the meanings associated with it are constructed in the process of moving between the positions of painter
and observer (actor and audience) when, as an observer, the artist is developing new
perspectives on what is being done. This process would not be possible without taking distance (both physically and symbolically) from the canvas. The particular episode referred to
above depicts the moment in which a mistake is spotted during the work; however, this is
not the only function of seeing the painting through the eyes of an external observer. The
movement between positions is in this case quick but, as the participant mentioned in the
pre-interview, he allowed time for extended periods of simply looking at the canvas between
episodes of layering. It is during this time that new things and directions become salient
and are acted upon in future work sessions. In this way, we can see how the reflective turn
can be both immediate (signaling the effects of an error) or distributed in time and even
across people. It is indeed not only the artist who, as an audience, comes to form new perspectives on the work but also his viewers (the real audiences) do this as well, often with
surprising effects; the painter talked about a woman who bought a piece because she liked
the three small cows in the distance while he never intended to depict any cows.
Through constant interactions with viewers, the painter discovers new perspectives on
his finished work; at the same time, he also devised his own means to reflect on work in
progress, for instance, taking photos of the painting at the end of each work session to
observe its transformation over time. Moreover, the research context offered by a methodology like SEBE is particularly favorable for self-reflection and it is for this reason the
artist admitting he accepted to take part in the project (I always wanted to analyze the
way I paint, because it is actually quite amazing when youre watching it because doing
it and watching it is kind of different). Within the post-interview, artist, and psychologists got to exchange perspectives about the process of painting, an exercise the participant (artist) found particularly useful:
Now I am analysing the way I work because you are telling me the way I am
working so I am thinking to myself maybe I should wait more before I continue
because I might have done something at that point [that] when I am standing back
I can say I like that but I missed it because I havent stood back and looked at it.
(. . .) Its been very interesting for me because listening to your comments has
made me analyse the way I work more and possibly your comments might change
the way that I work. Yeah it wont change the. . . yes it could change the finished
product, I dont know, but it certainly is interesting for me to hear your comments
because you are looking at it from a different angle than I am, because you are
looking at the psychological aspect of why I did this (. . .).

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Applies white on the canvas

Applies white on the canvas

Looks back very briefly at the effect

Applies a second stripe of white

Tries to blend in the white

Takes a longer look at the painting, from a

distance

FIGURE 3. The process of painting captured by the subjective camera.

On a final, methodological note, the SEBE method and the use of subjective cameras is
ideal for the study of perspectives in creative action not only for the participant who, in
this way, necessarily gets to reflect on action from the position of an observer in the
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Journal of Creative Behavior

post-interview. It is also beneficial for psychologists themselves who tend when studying a
phenomenon, as William James (1884) wisely noted early on in the history of the discipline, to confuse their own perspective with that of others (the psychologists fallacy) and
thus, ultimately, to end up imposing their interpretation of the world (their perspective)
on others.

CONCLUDING QUESTIONS
In this paper, I have outlined the basic premises of a perspectival framework of
creative action and illustrated it with the activity of one painter. This framework, and
particularly the move between actor and observer role, requires considerable metacognitive skills and strategies (for a general discussion see Armbruster, 1989). Particular developments in this direction, such as the concepts of metacreativity (Bruch, 1988) and
creative metacognition (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2013), can help us refine our understanding of the mental processes involved in perspective taking. However, an added value of
the conception advanced here is that it asks us to go beyond metacognition and understand its context of social interaction. It is because perspective-taking processes are highly
contextual that studying them only in terms of individual differences would be misleading: both the ontogenetic trajectory of the person and the concrete context of (inter)
action play a great part in how and when we get to use perspective-taking creatively.
While there is clear value in moving away from individualistic and mentalist accounts of
the creative process toward more social understandings, there are also many questions to
be raised with reference to this approach. Two important ones are a) whether this model
applies to creativity or simply the emergence of novelty, and b) whether it applies equally
well to a wide range of creative actions, including across creative domains.
Without elaborating too much, my view is that a perspectival framework is informative about more than creativity (but including creativity) and it does tell us something
essential about the creative process at a high level of generality. I base my first answer on
the fact that I take creativity to be mainly a social construct, a way of labeling processes
and outcomes that is constructed in the dialog between creative actors and their audiences (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; Gl
aveanu, 2011). In this sense, creativity is in fact a
(social) perspective through which we notice some phenomena around us and ignore
others. The painters case, briefly outlined above, is one in which both the participant
and the researchers positioned the work observed as creative. However, many other
everyday forms of creativity are not necessarily positioned in this way although they lead
to novelty (for the self, for others, etc.) through the same movement between perspectives documented in the case of the (creative) artist. I am therefore confident this
approach can be informative for an enlarged spectrum of creative outcomes, from mini
to Big C creations (see Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009) and, more than this, contribute to
widening our perspective on creativity. This last remark addresses partially the second
question. It is again my belief that a perspectival framework can be used to analyze different forms of creativity (habitual, improvisational, innovative; Gl
aveanu, 2012b) and
their expression in various domains (e.g., art, science, and everyday life). What remains
an open empirical question is how perspective taking processes are shaped by the particularities of each context, from general domains to concrete creative tasks (Kaufman &
Baer, 2004). A further interesting question refers to the role of materiality in facilitating
or constraining the development of new perspectives. In this regard, the basic framework
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outlined in this article will hopefully attract sufficient interest to be enriched and
updated, in time, by research conducted in different areas, with more participants and
using different methodologies.
Finally, the what for question will ultimately decide, in the good pragmatist tradition adopted here, the real value of a perspectival model of the creative process. I consider this approach more fertile when it comes to real life issues than models focused on
what happens inside the brain or the mind of creators. This is because the real world is
fundamentally a place marked by difference, divergence, and perspectives that complement or contradict each other, that are proposed, accepted, rejected, or made invisible.
How are we recognizing difference in ways that are productive for creative action and
dialog between self and other? How can we stimulate perspective taking and increase
reflexivity in creative work, and are they always useful? Finally, and most importantly,
how do we deal with the ethical consequences of silencing new perspectives in our relation to what we see as otherness? If creativity is indeed a sociocultural act, then such
social and cultural questions should be placed high on our research agenda.

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Vlad Petre Gl
aveanu, Aalborg University
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Vlad Petre Gl
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Communication and Psychology, Kroghstrde 3, 9220 Aalborg, Denmark. E-mail: vlad@hum.aau.dk

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude toward those who commented on the ideas included in this article during a
Studio meeting at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and a Kitchen seminar at Aalborg University, Denmark,
as well as two anonymous reviewers. The support of Saadi Lahlou and Alex Gillespie has been invaluable for both
collecting and understanding the empirical data presented here. Most of all, I am indebted to Constance de SaintLaurent for introducing me to the theory I am exploring in this article and, through our ongoing dialog about it,
opening up new perspectives that fundamentally enriched my own thinking about creativity.

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