Digital Making: Creating Open Online Studio Spaces

Introduction

For years now, people have been creating digital contents and sharing user-generated contents on various social platforms. These have included the following: selfies, photos, illustrations, digital art, and others. Those few who have a social following may have monetized their work, but the majority of social sharers have maybe only the satisfaction of having found an audience for their shares. The respective shared contents may be fully copyrighted and unusable without a contract with the legal owner of the digital contents; they may be released partially under defined licensure; or they may be wholly usable by anyone under any context with a full and complete release into the public domain (in an open-source way). The vast majority of the contents are by amateurs. Some professionals also engage, albeit more often in private channels with private groups. (There are real-world costs to both acquiring the expertise and then capturing the digital photos, visuals, and so on.)

“Creatives” are those whose work requires that they innovate constantly. In a general sense, these include those who work in the following disparate fields: illustration, engineering, advertising, marketing, musicianship, acting, architecture, interior design, industrial design, product design, graphic arts, human computer interactions, instructional design, and others. Across various fields, creativity is seen as “the single most important attribute to future business success” in a widespread study across 60 nations (IBM, 2010, as cited in Weinzimmer, Michel, & Franczak, Spring 2011, p. 62). Research suggests that creativity has to be supported and applied in workplace contexts (defined as “action orientation”) in order to have an effect on performance (Weinzimmer, Michel, & Franczak, Spring 2011). The innovation of individuals also carries over to personal professional success, in another study:

The prior work also reiterates the importance of applying the creativity, translating that into work in the world. In a more diffuse sense, all people in their respective professions have to demonstrate some level of creativity and new thinking and new doing. In terms of a “creative personality,” researchers have found “support for a positive relationship between creativity and relativism” (less likely than non-creatives to apply “universal rules in their moral decision making”) but also a positive relationship between “creativity and idealism,” suggesting that creative people are “situationists” (in the Forsyth sense, 1980, 1992), informed by “an ethic of caring and a pragmatic moral decision-making style” (Bierly, Kolodinsky, & Charette, 2008, p. 101).

Earlier thinking was that creativity was inborn and could not be taught (but also that inappropriate teaching could ruin the innate creativity). In contemporary thinking, there is the idea that everyone can be creative, in what has been called “the genius of everyman” (Douglas, 1977). Even decades ago, there was pressure on education to identify learners’ “creative characteristics” and work to speed up “the application in education of research findings from pertinent fields” to harness creativity for practical applications (Taylor, Autumn 1961, p. 9). Many people who are highly creative are also highly motivated: