Creativity 4.0. A method to explore the influences of the digital transition on human creativity within the design process

The doctoral dissertation moves from the observation that the ongoing scenario of digital transition is deeply impacting the human being, from the inner, less visible, cognitive and emotional levels that concern individuals to the outer, more evident and articulated interactions with other people. The ongoing digital transition has led to the complete restructuring of space and time creating a third reality, the onlife, a new experience of a hyperconnected world where physical and digital converge. Major digital transformations (e.g. artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, etc..) are so ubiquitous and invisible that are becoming our next nature, blurring the distinction between human, machine and nature. Human being is co-evolving with technologies and a new digitally enhanced generation is growing up totally immersed in a digital world, accepting digital enhancement as an opportunity and an integral part of their existence. Developing creative abilities become therefore a mission and a requirement for achieving a digital maturity, which enable to adapt to an ever changing digital landscape, to collaborate with machine and to wisely lead the technological development to boost innovation. The emerging assumption is that the creative abilities of the digitally enhanced generation is strongly influenced by the human, social and technological evolution characterizing the digital transition. Therefore, the research aims at structuring a scientific method to explore the main positive and negative influences that the current scenario of digital transition is bringing on multiple level of human creativity to inform and thus empower the creative design process for innovation. The exploration draws on the knowledge produce in the emerging domain of study named “Digital Creativity”, that is a wide and magmatic realm in rapid evolution and constant redefinition, where multiple disciplines already investigates the influences and relationship between creativity and digital technology from several and fragmented perspectives. A Human-centred approach has been adopted as a basic principle of the research. An extensive part has been dedicated at framing the creativity boundaries by identifying, from the psychology and sociology domain, the human components and related factors of creativity that influence the creative potential within the creative process. Five main components have been identified - creativity relevant processes, knowledge and skills, motivation and attitudes, emotion, social environment - that can be enhanced by stimulating the factors of creativity included within each of them. This theoretical analysis resulted in the definition of the Creativity 4.0 Model whose structure explains the complex and multidimensional nature of creativity in the digital transition from a human centred approach. The model recognize three main level of the human being involved in a creative activity that could be impacted by the ongoing digital transition: a cognitive level that includes the intellectual and cognitive processes of acquisition of knowledge, the individual level that include the behavioural and affective dimension, and the social level referred to the communication and collaboration with other individuals. The main aim of the model is to guide the exploration in the Digital Creativity domain to identify some influences on the human creative abilities, and to analyse which among the collected creativity factors are the most crucial ones in the digital transition. Three main qualitative exploration has been conducted through the model. The first aimed at observing some impacts of the digital transition on the three human levels and understanding how they positively or negatively influence the factors of creativity and the creative process. The second analysis aimed at exploring the opportunities offered by digital technologies for supporting the creative process. The third aimed at confirming and enriching the achieved results with experts within the digital creativity realm. The resulted influences have been mapped on an analytical framework that deconstruct the design process in step, activities and factors of creativity to generate a Creativity 4.0 Framework whose aim is to provide a deep understanding of the changes that influence the creative expression within the design process. The framework, therefore, supports the definition of action to empower the creative design process by exploiting the opportunities provided by the digital transition. The research path contributes to formalize a human-centred method, where the Creativity 4.0 Model and Framework become the fundamental tools to make a wiser and consciously use of the digital opportunities addressed to human creative enhancement for innovation. The method support a continuous exploration of the influences on the creative abilities within the design process to design tools and methods that facilitate and support the emotional, motivational, cognitive and social factors of the human being that intervene in the creative design process as well as the process itself. The research grows at the intersection of different disciplines, design, psychology, sociology and computer science and has benefit from a continuous dialogue with a network of experts in these fields.