Reflection 1
In this paper, the authors measure creativity in the context of providing solutions to open problems. Inter-rater reliability (IRR) is the primary metric the researchers used to measure this creativity. They seek to utilize the capability of analogous situations to providing solutions. They take advantage of the increase in popularity of crowdsourcing to help tackle their hypotheses and experiments. There are two major experiments that they conduct: a) testing whether schemas increase the odds of finding solutions in an idea repository (i.e. Quirky.com) and b) tested the usefulness of the analogies/solutions produced from Experiment 1 and also create a crowd analogy searching process. Overall, the experiments were limiting but also showed promise. The results from Experiment 1 showed that schemas can find more analogies that don’t focus on “source features” but rather on similarities of structures. Experiment 2 showed that analogies that are grouped in a cluster can be useful to create a solution to a problem. Furthermore, the person(s) that grouped the analogies can vary from the people who use the analogies to create solutions.
One major limitation that the authors admit, and also came to mind while I was reading it, is the challenge of creating helpful schemas. These experiments used relatively easy concepts and situations for their producing of schemas and features. Furthermore, the more complex the system is might indicate an increase in difficulty in conceptualizing and summarizing an issue. For instance, if it was a super complex physics, biology, or chemistry problem, there could be a limit in finding a reasonable schema that could lead to the helpful production of analogies because it is so unique to its domain. In that same token, a risk or negative impact of this way of thinking could be not fully understanding a domain before implementing a solution discovered from an analogy. It would have been nice to see the solutions implemented on a small scale. Additionally, it might improve the validity of the results to have more than one raters for the IRR process. Early on, the research paper cites a situation in which a man made an analogy between freeing a cork from a wine bottle to babies stuck in birth canals. The results of the this research and school of thought might not be as successful as this prominent case. However, there are important takeaways from this situation. Most importantly, the man who came up with the idea was a mechanic and he collaborated with those in the medical field to help make the solution proposal became a reality. This is very aligned with the course and collaboration among various disciplines has been historically, and continues to be, extremely healthy for making progress in the world.