Social Creativity: Exploiting the Power of Cultures of Participation

Most interesting, important, and pressing problems facing our societies in the 21st century transcend the individual human mind. They require social creativity to explore, frame, solve, and assess their solutions. To bring social creativity alive, cultures of participation need to be fostered and supported with socio-technical environments in which all stakeholders are able to express themselves, combine different perspectives, and generate new understandings. Social creativity and cultures of participation are facilitated by meta-design that allows stakeholders to act as designers, contributors, and decision makers in personally meaningful activities. This paper defines conceptual frameworks and briefly describes different applications contexts in gaining a deeper understanding of the challenges how to exploit the power of cultures of participation to enhance social creativity.