Discussing creativity from a cultural psychological perspective Alex Gillespie, Cor Baerveldt, Alan Costall, James Cresswell, Constance de Saint-Laurent, Vlad Gla ˘veanu, Vera John-Steiner, Sandra Jovchelovitch, Keith Sawyer, Lene Tanggaard, Jaan Valsiner, Brady Wagoner, and Tania Zittoun Alex Gillespie: Each of the forgoing chapters has advanced differing aspects of the cultural psychology of creativity. In this final chapter we aim both to synthe- size what has been written and also catalyze future directions for research. To achieve this aim, we are harnessing the creative potential of social processes by jointly writing the chapter as a dialogue. The questions addressed will be first, what is creativity from a cultural standpoint, and second, what implications might this standpoint have for intervention, methodology, and future research. Keith Sawyer: Many people believe that creativity is generated by solitary indi- viduals, a ‘lone genius’ view of creativity. And yet, all of the research, includ- ing historical, biographical, and empirical social sciences research, shows that creativity never comes from solitary individuals. Creativity always emerges from collaborative groups, conversations, and social networks. This is why we need the cultural psychological perspective: to help us explain the social interactions that generate creativity. In particular, the cultural psychological perspective is essen- tial in analyzing and explaining how creative breakthroughs emerge over time, over weeks, months, and years. Brady Wagoner: Keith makes the important point that cultural psychology sensi- tizes us to social relations and emergence over time as key to understanding crea- tivity. The issue of time makes me wonder if we might do better to talk about the ‘creative process’ or ‘creative action,’ than ‘creativity’ as such. The term ‘creativity’ encourages us to think of it as a thing, which either resides in individuals or is an end product of their interactions. What we should be focusing on, from a cultural psy- chology perspective, is creativity as a complex ongoing process, oriented to an open future, in which social others and cultural tools directly participate in and are consti- tutive of. A similar move was made in another research context by Frederic Bartlett (1932/1995), who began to talk about ‘remembering’ rather than ‘memory.’ In other words, he aimed to move away from studying a mental faculty, and instead focused on exploring remembering as a complex activity, occurring in time and incorporat- ing multiple processes, the most important of which are social and cultural. 1 Published in V. Glăveanu; A. Gillespie & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Rethinking creativity: Contributions from cultural psychology, pp. 125-141, 2015, which should be used for any reference to this work