Space Syntax Lab Lecture: Prof John S. Gero

Social Computing Models of Design Creativity 

This special guest lecture will take place after Sam McElhinney's Space Syntax Seminar at 4pm discussing Isovist 2.0 – a high resolution, high speed app for analysing visibility relations. 

Lecturer's Abstract

This talk will first outline a process-based framework for creativity before introducing the foundational concepts of situated cognition as a basis for social computing models of creativity. The situated cognition concepts are grouped under the following headings:

• Social interaction
• Constructive memory
• Stigmergy
• Situatedness

In this lecture, two implemented social computing models of creativity will be presented. The first implementation demonstrates the behavior of a social, situated, curious agent-based model that generates products within an ecology of other producers. This results in emergent social structures that influence the creativity of producers.

The second implementation demonstrates how the value systems that consumers use to evaluate products as innovative evolve as they interact with product representations and with other consumers. This lecture will therefore present:

• Concepts of situated cognition as a basis for designing social computational agents
• Results from a study of creative behavior in a social setting
• Results from a study of innovation through consumer social behavior

The talk will conclude by relating these computational models to Schumpeter’s concept of 'creative destruction'.

Biography

John S. Gero is Research Professor at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte and at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Virginia. He has authored and edited over 50 books and published over 650 research papers.

He has been a professor of computer science, cognitive science, architecture, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering at numerous universities. These include MIT, UC-Berkeley, UCLA, Columbia and Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, Strathclyde and Loughborough in the UK, INSA-Lyon and Provence in France and EPF Lausanne in Switzerland.

His recent research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NASA.

Image: Social interactions in a design space (Professor J. S. Gero)