Exploring artifacts and documents in collective creativity workshops applied to future studies.

Abstract

In a context of uncertainty, organizations use creativity methods to anticipate future challenges in relations with the long-term evolutions of the society. These approaches consist in bringing together people with complementary points of view to multiply the diversity of ideas. This paper focuses on the process of transformation and selection of ideas and artifacts from a collective perspective in the unprecedented circumstances that occurred during the pandemic. We question how ideas are grounded in the documents and artifacts produced at the key moments of the creative process from the perspective of the facilitators and the participants. In this paper we aim to understand the artifacts and documents involved in the creative process by means of the “Semiotics of Cooperative Transactions” theory (Zacklad, 2020). We use the concept of cooperative transactions by Dewey (Zacklad, 2020). A transaction is an abstract structure that manifests itself through a series of conversations and interactions that facilitate cooperation (Zacklad, 2020). We differentiate an artifact from a document that lasts beyond the creative process. And we identified barriers to the perpetuation of originality.