Building Creative Capacity Building in University Graduates: What we can learn from boids and voids

This paper draws on recent computing and social organizational research to open up new possibilities for constructing learning environments that optimise opportunities for university students (and, indeed, their teachers) to work as members of dynamic creative teams. Given that the challenge of setting up a learning environment that fosters such a complex mix of relational dynamics is not a simple matter of ensuring that people feel good about themselves, the paper canvasses two areas of research that can be usefully bought together to provide principles on which to build learning environment for ‘high flying’ creatives.

The first is research that synthesises computer animation and biological behaviour to understand how ‘birds of a feather flock together’. ‘Flocking together’ allows birds (boids are the computer animated variety) to fly higher and exhibit greater scheduling and routing capabilities than each bird can do alone. The means by which this extra capacity is achieved can tell us a lot about how we might do better in a team environment than we can alone. The second is the sociological research that inquires into how good ideas get picked up and moved about in organizations, that is, how a novel idea, produced in one specialist cluster, can be transported across ‘holes’ (voids) in the organization to and integrated with the work of different, even unrelated, clusters of specialists.

Insights from these two different domains of research – one focusing on the ‘micro’ dynamics of a team of a few people, and the other focusing on the macro dynamics of working across teams, are combined to develop principles for building a learning environment that can optimize creative high flying.