Creativity: Implications for Search
October 10, 2016
“Computer Scientists Discover 14 key Components of Creativity” tries to reveal what differentiates the creative person from the average individual. Let’s look at the attributes of creativity:
- Active involvement and persistence. Yes, this is two attributes packaged as one
- Dealing with uncertainty
- Domain competence
- General intellectual ability
- Generation of results
- Independence and freedom. Another two’fer.
- Intention and emotional involvement. The bundling approach seems semi-creative. Maybe a cop out?
- Originality
- Progression and development. Again!
- Social interaction and communication. Obviously a pattern of creating one “new” idea by sticking two things together.
- Spontaneity/subconscious processing. Again two to make one.
- Thinking and evaluation. Isn’t evaluating a component of thinking?
- Value.
- Variety, Divergence as well as Experimentation. Now three attributes combine to produce one attribute. Does this overlap with other components.
Reflecting on this list, my hunch is that a bit more creativity in making the attributes clear might be needed. The list is interesting, but it lack—how shall I phrase it—creativity.
How does this apply to search?
For old school Boolean systems like ip.com, one has to know what one is looking for before the search system is of much help. Thus, the system can only respond to inputs from a human. The more creative the human, the less likely the cut and paste snippets function will be. Other systems with this less than creative approach include other Boolean systems and Lucene.
For modern predictive systems, the creativity shifts from the human to the software. The idea is that the software will look at the user’s history, similar users’ behaviors, GPS coordinates, and other observable information and produce outputs like Alexa or Google mobile search. The human does not have to think. The creativity seems somewhat limited because when one is looking for pizza via a mobile phone, some of the attributes seem less than creative.
Search systems which try to respond to the thoughts and notions of the human user and software delivering results based on rules are elusive.
Creativity may be difficult to generate and deal with. Perhaps that is why the list of 14 attributes includes multiple word descriptions which try to get at a single notion.
Cleverness is not on the list. Why not? I find clever approaches to search more interesting than creative searches. Clever?
Stephen E Arnold, October 10, 2016
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