Scheduled: Edith PRAT

Jury

Abstract

The widespread adoption of digital technologies is transforming the conditions under which collective creative activities take place. While research on online collaborative creativity has primarily focused on the characteristics of technologies, individuals, or interactions, this dissertation proposes to shift the analysis toward the hybrid sociomaterial assemblages within which these activities occur. It thus seeks to understand how these assemblages reconfigure the conditions of collective creative activity in online collaborative sessions. This research builds upon existing work on the social production of space, situated approaches to action, and sociomaterial perspectives. It posits that creative activity never unfolds independently of the spatial, temporal, material, and relational configurations in which actors are engaged. Digital environments are therefore not merely technical supports added to a preexisting activity: they contribute to the structuring of practices, interactions, and possibilities for action. From this perspective, the challenge is not to identify isolated determinants of creativity, but to understand how different dimensions of the environment are articulated during the activity and contribute to shaping its conditions of possibility. The dissertation is based on three empirical studies focused on online collective creativity sessions. The first identifies the factors likely to support or hinder creative activity in online collaborative environments. The second examines the role of facilitation artifacts—particularly templates—in structuring practices and interactions between facilitators and participants. The third analyzes how digital environments produce and organize temporal structures that are experienced by teams and influence the course of their creative activity. Putting these results into perspective leads us to view online creativity sessions as hybrid configurations in which material and digital spaces, physical and digital artifacts, temporalities, forms of presence, and collective practices are continually interlinked. This approach demonstrates that the conditions for collective creativity cannot be reduced to the intrinsic properties of technologies or to the physical presence of participants alone. They emerge from the dynamic relationships between actors, systems, artifacts, spaces, and temporalities. The thesis thus contributes by proposing a sociomaterial interpretation of online collective creativity, in which hybrid arrangements constitute a unit of analysis that enables us to rethink the conditions of creative activity.