The Praxis of Insight: Interactivity and Prototyping in Creative Problem Solving

This open access book offers a critical appraisal of psychological research on creativity and insight, challenging the tautology that creative people have creative ideas. Instead, it demonstrates how insights emerge through interactive engagement with manipulable objects-physical or digital.

The author outlines an alternative methodology to trace the co-constitutive interaction between people and things. Using video analysis, he reveals creativity as distributed across person-object systems, with participants accomplishing insight through observable practices: moving, constructing, responding to what emerges. The focus shifts from analyzing cognitive processes to exploring how ideas stem from interaction with prototypes. Causal directionality is reversed: through making, ideas are discovered. A groundbreaking reflection on creativity and its dialogue with objects, this short monograph is an essential read for researchers in cognitive psychology, creativity studies, design, business, innovation management, and cognitive ethnography.