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The constraints of habit: craft, repetition, and creativity

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Abstract

The nature of craft creativity has often been ignored in research which focuses on innovative and novel ideas and thought processes. This view of creativity casts the repetitive nature of craft as antithetical to the disruptive nature of genuine creativity. Drawing on combined enactivist and pragmatist accounts of habits and on a focused cognitive ethnography of a wooden bowl turner, this paper explores the nature of the constraints wrought by habitual action. Habitual action will be shown to be less repetitive than may be initially assumed because of the uncertainty inherent in working with both the wood which forms the initial material and the tools necessary to transform it. Rather, this paper proposes habitual learned movements as an important concept in a pragmatist-informed theory of creativity since they mark the skilled co-ordination of material, tool and maker, at once constraining and enhancing the creative craft process.

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Notes

  1. Although this is not to discount the subpersonal thinking which is the hallmark of habitual engagement with a changing world.

  2. https://turnersco.com/.

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Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without both the skill and the thoughts of Mike Groves and we thank him wholeheartedly for allowing us to be part of his making process. We would also like to thank Tom Ormerod for stimulating conversations which informed some of the thinking in this paper and Michael Kimmel for detailed comments on an earlier draft.

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Correspondence to Wendy Ross.

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Ross, W., Glăveanu, V. The constraints of habit: craft, repetition, and creativity. Phenom Cogn Sci (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09902-5

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