It’s About What Happens in the Meantime: The Temporal Interplay of Individual and Collective Creativity

In creativity research, time is rarely conceptualized as a multidimensional phenomenon. Instead, it is conceived either as an external variable, for coordinating successive phases of an idea journey, interaction patterns, and moments of insight—or as an individual experience, encompassing aspects like stress or timelessness. Based on an ethnography of a music studio, I show how these temporalities coexist and how time is organized as a linear coordination process as well as an experience to enable and align individual and collective creativity. Time is thereby available in three dimensions, as planned time for linear sequencing of collective work steps, as assigned meantime for the spontaneous and parallel allocation of tasks to free time slots, and as idle meantime for indeterminate waiting periods afforded by the material temporality of artifacts and bodies. My findings elucidate that organizing the interplay of all three temporal dimensions favors both individual ideation in indeterminate situations of idleness and collective creative work on predefined tasks in planned phases and ad hoc structured situations. Importantly, I found how the time afforded by artifacts and bodies in creative work is key to enabling and aligning individual creative processes by providing opportunities for relaxation, defocusing, and humor during collective creative processes, based on coordinated interaction. My findings contribute to a social process perspective on creativity by reconsidering the role of individual experiences in creative collaboration from a temporal perspective.

Funding: This research was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [Grant 10.55776/I4884].