Creative Annotation
The Fundamentals of Technology CCT Course requires students to choose a technology to research for the semester. The course structure and objectives are important to call out for a few reasons. First, let’s look at the course objectives:
Course Objectives: Students will learn to de-black box technologies in the Georgetown style, which means you'll learn to break down technologies as value based sociotechnical systems discovering points of intervention. Over the course, students will work in teams to:
Organize the human and non-human elements of the system;
Obtain familiarity with the inner-workings of technical hardware and computational components of their system;
Continue to master identifying foundational research, as well as impactful secondary sources;
Locate and work with primary sources;
Present and critique ongoing work concisely to peers/crowd;
Determine opportunities for intervention;
Present their work visually in digital and print form.
Objectives 1, 2, 5, and 7 reflect a big portion of the course, which was workshopping and presenting a final 24x36 inch board of a large, complex sociotechnical system of our choosing. It’s a challenging task, and complex information like what we’re supposed to visualize might be better displayed in a more interactive format instead of a 2-D representation of its many moving parts. Upon reflection, it’s possible that this final format requirement is already too constraining for students–what if some students had a gift for video game design and creating an immersive experience was something they felt more confident about? Staley (2018)’s critiques of higher education hint at the constraints that may have been present in our final assignment. He claims that universities are suffering from a poverty of imagination and instead offers alternatives to the sensorily impoverished institutions we’re familiar with. In his chapter on The University of the Body, he claims:
“The culture of the printed page and even of the screen reduced the ambient, reduced the information space down such that the only information that counted, especially in education context, was information that was suitable for the page.”
To effectively de-blackbox a complex system, Staley’s ideas on The University of the Body could be a better way to experience all of its moving parts and unlock novel connections that are potentially harder to make in textual or graphic format. Unfortunately, this course is still under a traditional university system, one in which information and ideas are still reduced to a screen.
The syllabus prescribed a certain research and thinking structure, so external factors were heavily constraining and guiding our direction. Amabile’s (2018) provides the characteristics of work environments that are typically correlated with high-creativity projects including: freedom in deciding what work to do and how to do it, a sense of doing challenging and important work, having sufficient resources to do the work, work group supports, supervisory encouragement, and organizational encouragement (p. 8-9). At a quick glance, it seems like most of these environmental needs were met by the course structure–I (and my group) had the freedom to decide our technology, understood the complexity and importance of de-blackboxing a technical system, had the digital tools and information access needed to do our research, had each other and our TAs to work through questions and roadblocks, received biweekly research and creative feedback from the professor, and were encouraged to do our best work by program advisors and non-5006 professors who knew the intensity of this required course. If the overall course environment met all of Amabile’s criteria for high-creativity projects, what other factors contributed to the weekly creative and knowledge blocks?
To start, Amabile suggests that workload pressure like unrealistic expectations for productivity and distractions from creative work can also be an obstacle for creativity, and the semester undoubtedly consisted of many of these obstacles. In the case of a group project with various personality and creative types, and varying levels of motivation and skills, a dynamic model of creativity would be most appropriate for understanding the creative forces at play. Amabile’s dynamic componential model of creativity and innovation in organizations (p. 12) seems most relevant to the dynamics that shaped our creative work. Both intrinsic and extrinsic factors affect someone's creative performance, including skills in the task domain, creativity relevant processes (such as personality traits, ways of thinking, and ways of working) and task motivation (Amabile, 2018). Externally, the social environment should also be conducive to creativity. All four of these components are dynamic, affecting different aspects of the creative process at different times and levels. These feedback loops are important to consider in how creative ideas unfolded within my 5006 group.
Using these frameworks, it’s easier to understand some of the internal and external tensions that arose throughout the semester, not just within my creative process, but also across groups. Here’s how the rest of the course unfolded.
Week 3:
Histories and Iterations
1/28/2025
The Oura Ring was chosen by the group, but I wasn’t too excited to dig into a wearable ring. I was intrigued by more hidden tech and systems, like the Hubble space telescope! However, it was the start of a creative project that I was looking forward to all year. According to the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity, people will be more creative when they are motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction and challenge of the work itself and not by extrinsic motivators or constraints (Amabile, 2018, p. 6). Though I cannot speak for the rest of my group, my personal intrinsic motivation was high and I felt energized and full of ideas for the final design. I was so excited to implement my vision that I jumped right into mood boarding, looking for design inspiration that would help frame our group check-ins and discussions each week. To help facilitate role assignments, my group members all declared their skills, with some openly admitting that they were bad at design or better at research. This made me think of the creative personalities/types, to which maybe my group didn’t have many in the “design” or artistic interpretations of the word. However, I felt that due to language barriers, it would be better for me to do the research and hand off the design to someone else. Around this time, I was also recommended the Waking Up app, a meditation app that was reinforcing some of the spirituality concepts mentioned by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, so I continued taking myself on artist dates, and being kind towards myself, which was going to be important in giving me the mental and emotional energy to feed my creativity.
Week 5:
Motivations and Power Players
2/25/2025
During the mood-boarding activities, I was inspired by some mid-century scientific illustrations I’d seen and created some mockups of what the board could look like–I was scared to lose creative momentum, so I revisited the mockups a few times that week and experimented with the glimpses of inspiration I’d get. Selfishly, I cared a lot about this project as a potential portfolio piece, and labor of love. Since it would make a statement about my creative abilities, the stakes felt higher. My team was excited to give me creative direction this week and generally had no concerns or input about the design, though I think the creative blocks that eventually unfolded could have been overcome more easily with a bit more collaboration and communication about ideas. My head was making so many connections and I wanted to dive into all of them, but felt further constrained by the lack of time and mental energy to pursue them. Things also got a bit awkward when we presented our work and received this explicit comment from our professor in front of the whole class: “This looks like a puff piece!” I felt a lot of embarrassment to be part of the team.
This incident triggered anger and resentment towards the creative project which added some pressure to the dynamic and group expectations. My perfectionism was starting to take over at this point, and as Julia Cameron describes, I felt stuck in an obsessive correction loop, refusing to let myself move on from the disappointment of this single week on a semester-long project (Cameron, 2016, p. 119). I was now in protective critique mode, doing both research and design, hoping to “single handedly” get the project back on track. This intense creative disappointment and frustration brings us to Feist (2018), who proposes a functional model of the creative personality (p. 68) which I think can be used in defense of my neuroticism throughout the semester. I’m using the word neuroticism in a somewhat-playful manner as a word that my friend and I use to describe ourselves, though it is also clinically true that I struggle in the mental health department. Feist suggests that some personality traits, including neuroticism and psychoticism, are predictors of creativity (p. 71). It’s possible that the combination of stress and anxiety I felt over this project helped us get to the finish line. This also makes me more willing to befriend those traits in myself that are often frustrating. However, other groups also struggled with collaborative research dynamics and presenting quality work, so maybe balancing group members by skills and creative personalities could have minimized creative blocks and tensions.
In hindsight, the jump to the final design idea before starting our research and informing the direction might have violated some cardinal design rules and creative problem solving models. Traditional design thinking models offer five iterative steps for projects like these (empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test). However, I think this model was too simplistic for the demands being made of us in such short timeframes (1 week to do the research, work on board designs for that section, and present to the class). It’s possible that the limited time I had to work on design created some additional obstacles to divergent production and thinking, which is a valuable skill for this course. Divergent production is defined as the kind of thinking that is characterized by breaking away from conventional restrictions on thinking and letting the mind flow across a range of potential solutions to a problem (Renzulli, 2018, p. 214). In alignment with this, a course objective to promote divergent thinking could have been: collaborate with a group to creatively de-blackbox a socio-technical system and present the information in an engaging format. Realistically, this probably would have raised more questions and stressed people out given the ambiguity of “creativity” but maybe it would have been a welcomed challenge at the University of the Body.
Week 7:
Metals and Bits
3/11/2025
Going into week 3, there were a lot of lingering emotions from the previous week. I was also beginning to feel creatively drained as the semester continued and group members dealt with competing priorities. To help me through this, I leaned into my Julia Cameron toolbox for dealing with creative blocks like this. One step I had to take was recovering a sense of connection and shedding the perfectionism that was stopping me from moving forward and being enthusiastic about it.
Surprisingly, this week felt the easiest to get through from a creative and group perspective. It’s possible that the direction of our research and board was clearer this week, and that contributed to some of the ease. Since we were researching a physical technology, it was our moment to shine and dig into the product’s materials. I sketched a lot this week–finding moments of creative inspiration as I went about my days. Mapping out how all of the materials would look on the board for our class presentation. I think this worked well for my creative process because I actually felt good about my design parts this week.
Weeks 9 and 11:
Infrastructure and Standards; Users and Non-Users
3/25/2025 and 4/8/2025
During weeks 9 and 11, I was overwhelmed with what now felt like a creative burden while I also worked through recovering a sense of faith (Cameron, 2018, p. 193-202)–faith and trust in my own creative process, knowing that the ideas would come to me and when it came down to it, everything I’d been saving, sketching, and designing would all become parts of a whole, and all of my mental notes would find their place in the final product. Having this faith in my process wasn’t easy, but I felt more aware of the emotions and the thoughts that make up my creative flows, and the physical work environments that make me think more creatively. Shortly after our infrastructure and standards presentation, we met with the professor to discuss a creative “risk” I was interested in taking. I wanted to break apart the sections and integrate them into each other since the whole point of the de-blackboxing process is seeing how different parts of the system connect and influence each other. I was also leaning into Cropley’s (2018) focus on encouraging habits of mind that make creativity transferable, like being able to link ideas from different fields and enjoy the risk of trying a new approach within the education system (p. 47-62). It was important for me to encourage this kind of thinking amongst people that viewed our final board, especially since they would lack additional context for the technology. In the end, I think this mild creative risk paid off, and although I had multiple moments of hating and critiquing my design work, I was able to work through those blocks with my new understanding of creativity within myself and others.
Final Board
References
Amabile, T. (2018). Creativity and the labor of love. In The Nature of Human Creativity (pp. 1–15). Cambridge University Press.
Cameron, J. (1992). The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Perigee.
Cropley, A. (2018). Bringing Creativity Down to Earth: A Long Labor Lost? In The Nature of Human Creativity (pp. 47-62). Cambridge University Press.
Feist, G. (2018). In Search of the Creative Personality. In The Nature of Human Creativity (pp. 63-76). Cambridge University Press.
Staley, D. J. (2019). Alternative Universities: Speculative design for Innovation in Higher Education. John Hopkins University Press.
Renzulli, J. (2018) The Malleability of Creativity: A Career in Helping Students Discover and Nurture their Creativity. In The Nature of Human Creativity (pp. 209-223). Cambridge University Press.