The Praxis of Insight: Interactivity and Prototyping in Creative Problem Solving (Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture)

This open access book offers a critical appraisal of psychological research on creativity and insight, challenging the tautology that creative people have creative ideas. Instead, it demonstrates how insights emerge through interactive engagement with manipulable objects—physical or digital.

The author outlines an alternative methodology to trace the co-constitutive interaction between people and things. Using video analysis, he reveals creativity as distributed across person-object systems, with participants accomplishing insight through observable practices: moving, constructing, responding to what emerges. The focus shifts from analyzing cognitive processes to exploring how ideas stem from interaction with prototypes. Causal directionality is reversed: through making, ideas are discovered. A groundbreaking reflection on creativity and its dialogue with objects, this short monograph is an essential read for researchers in cognitive psychology, creativity studies, design, business, innovation management, and cognitive ethnography.

Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau is Professor of Psychology at Kingston University London. His research demonstrates how creative insights emerge through interactive engagement with objects rather than from isolated minds. Drawing on distributed cognition and Science and Technology Studies, he uses video analysis to reveal creativity as enacted practice.