Creating Social Creativity: Integrative Transdisciplinarity and the Epistemology of Complexity

The increasing interest in “social creativity” over the last 20 years, has also led to a reflection on how “creativity” has itself been created by researchers. Different strategies in the study of creativity reflect different underlying assumptions about, among other things, the nature and role inquiry, the fundamental unit of analysis, the relationship between self and society, and the purpose of research. Two approaches are outlined in broad strokes, focusing on simplicity and complexity respectively. The former is inspired by the natural sciences and aims to abstract the essential feature of a phenomenon from unessential elements, with the laboratory as its gold standard. The more recent complex approach addresses context, relationships and connections as well as uncertainty and unpredictability. In order to address the complexity of connections, relationships, emergence, and factors that cannot be contained in one discipline, one of the central characteristics of a complex approach is its transdisciplinarity, and specifically Integrative Transdisciplinarity.