A review of creativity studies in the nineteenth and twentieth century revealed that this large corpus of contributions tended to cluster into just a few research questions (Becker 1995, p� 220):
1� What is creativity?
2� Who has creativity?
3� What are the characteristics of creative people?
4� Who should benefit from creativity?
5� Can creativity be increased through conscious effort?
The above questions are still guiding research on creativity today, as the present book corroborates, by translating these domain-general research questions into the domain-specificity of the arts and reinterpreting their formulation:
1� How can we understand artistic creativity and how do artists themselves de-fine it?
2� Who practices artistic creativity and under which circumstances?
3� What are the creative characteristics of artists, artistic processes and works of art?
4� Can our educational systems and organisations in general benefit from re-search on artistic creativity?
5� Can artistic creativity be increased through conscious effort?
Milestones for contemporary understandings of creativity and creativity re-search have been the IQ measurements of Binet and colleagues looking at the relationships between “factor g” (the general factor of psychometrics) and intel-ligence, Torrance’s insights into the apprehension of creativity in education and Guilford’s conceptual distinction between divergent and convergent thinking�
The latter’s Presidential Address for the American Psychological Association marks for many researchers the starting point of the scientific approach to crea-tivity research (Kaufman & Sternberg 2010, Plucker & Makel 2010, p� 50)�
In spite of diverse methodologies and a large variety of approaches (economic, psychometric, evolutionary, systemic and so on), creativity studies tend to focus on either one or a combination of several of the following areas, also called the creativity Four (or Six) P’s: person, process, product, place (or press), and the more recent P’s, persuasion and potentials� Some of them can be intuitively com-prehended, especially the first three, others might need explication� The six P’s can be defined and applied to the domain-specificity of the arts as follows:
1� Person: the characteristics of the creative person, often assessed by psycho-metric measures� This is the area that receives most attention from research-ers� In the domain of the arts, the characteristics of the artistic creator have often been studied in relationship to mental illness or genetic features�
2� Process: the characteristics and steps of the creative process� According to Guilford (1957), stages of the creative process may vary in definitions and number, but the dialectic divergent/convergent seems to be fundamental to processual theories� In the domain of the arts, researchers have often found
exemplary cases of creative processes (Weisberg 1993) but there are not many in-depth, domain-specific enquiries into artistic generative processes�
3� Product: the characteristics and qualities of the creative product� In the arts, this translates into the analysis of artworks and the instrumental use of art-works as cultural documents�
4� Place (or press from pressures): the characteristics of the environments that nurture creative persons� It indicates the psychological and physical environ-ments that foster the flourishing of creative individuals, processes or prod-ucts� Rather than a physical place, the concept of place/press designates mutual relationships and interactions between individuals or groups and mi-lieu� Awareness of this aspect of creativity is quite recent and derives from the belief that “creativity tends to flourish when there are opportunities for explo-ration and independent work, and when originality is supported and valued”
(Kozbelt, Beghetto & Runco 2010, p� 25)� When applied to the arts, this area of studies takes an unfortunate turn - it tends to interpret place as physical space, missing in this way the cutting-edge potential of the concept, which is its potentially large impact on development and learning� Fortunately, a more prolific approach is emerging in the educational field: the arts-integration approach to education (Deasy 2002, Fiske 1999, Rabkin & Redmond 2004) that assumes the possibility of designing an optimal learning environment through the arts and their contribution to creativity, learning and change�
5� Persuasion: this recent concept has been brought to researchers’ attention by Simonton (1990)� It focuses on the influences that a creative person can exert in a domain, in order to change the domain and the society’s view on a do-main� This perspective assumes that creativity is associated with change and has a social impact� Therefore, creative people must be persuasive in order to change a domain and be recognised as ground-breaking� Traditionally, this research area draws data from historiometric studies, where the field of the arts delivers a large number of exemplary cases� Because of the arts’ frequent provocation of the status quo, we have many examples of persuasion: Impres-sionist painters had to fight hard in order to be accepted in their field and be recognised as domain-changers rather than as bad painters�
6� Potentials: added to the list of P’s by Runco (2003) the area of creative poten-tial endeavours to look at human potenpoten-tial, rather than at already exploited and fulfilled creative performance� This perspective has great potential (no pun intended) especially in developmental and educational areas� In the do-main of the arts, one relevant line of enquiry might be the influence of artistic creativity in boosting individual potential or the examination of an artist’s unfulfilled possibilities� More broadly, studies in this direction can lead to
investigation of the sociological identity of artists: when is someone to be de-fined as an “artist”? What is relevant to the definition of creativity, the finished product (artwork) or the artistic idea and potential for original creation?
Another central letter in the creativity alphabet is “c”� If the P’s of creativity offer a taxonomy of the creativity’s locus (where is creativity and who is doing what, how and where?), the C’s of creativity enquire about magnitude: how much creativity?
This idea is actually implicit in Runco’s definition of potential, as we can assume that potentials can be exploited or can remain unexploited� However, the C’s of creativity also contribute to the locus perspective, by moving our attention from a definitional issue (what is creativity?) to a systemic view: where is creativity?
Csikszentmihalyi (1996), raising the above question, theorises a systemic perspective that closely relates person, process, product and places� With the purpose of approaching creativity not only as a psychological but also as a socio-cultural phenomenon, Csikszentmihalyi conceived the model below�
Figure 1. Where is creativity? Inspired by Csikszentmihalyi (1996).