Rewriting the Language of Creativity: The Five A's Framework

Abstract

For the past 5 decades the psychology of creativity has been influenced by what is known as the 4 P's of creative expression: person, process, product, and press. This conceptual schema, initially proposed by Rhodes (1961) , helped researchers structure their thinking about the phenomenon. However, it also supported an individualistic, static, and oftentimes disjointed vision of creativity. The present article aims to rewrite this fundamental language of the discipline by using terms that explicitly endorse a systemic, contextual, and dynamic approach. The 5 A's framework—actor, action, artifact, audience, affordances—is grounded in current literature from sociocultural and ecological psychology as well as theories of the distributed mind and tries to achieve a more comprehensive and unitary perspective on creativity. Several theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are considered.