Engineers know how to surf cost-benefit curves. In a mature engineering discipline, it is possible to predict the quality of some future product based on trade-offs between process, product, and personnel decisions. These decisions include the skills of the people on the team, the requirements of the product being produced, the method of production, or the time allocated to the project. For example, the classic engineering trade off is "better, faster, cheaper": pick any two. In this talk I want to explore several issues. a) Can creativity be engineered? b) Is that even a useful question? c) And, if so, is there any evidence that it is even possible? d) What new technologies are required to support "creativity engineering"? e) How does such a notion challenge or change existing notions? My answers to the above are, in order: a) yes b) yes c) yes d) not much. e) a lot Well, that's my paper. Thank you and good evening. Tim Menzies Assoc Prof Computer Science WVU tim@menzies.us p.s. If you are interested in more details, then let us continue. Based on the success of the software engineering, I argue that creativity can be engineered and, routinely, is done so in a commercial setting. I agree with Glass (2007), that software engineering is a highly creative process. Many standard software engineering practices are devoted to the control and exploitation of that creative process. - In Brooks' classic text The Mythical Man Month (1975), Brooke reminds us that software construction requires exploration and making mistakes. ``Plan to throw one (version) away", he says, "you will, anyhow.'' - Boehm's Spiral Model (1986) for risk-driven development was motivated by a need for an extensive exploration and creative phase before knuckling down to a rigid production schedule. - Advocates of extreme programming (a.k.a. agile programming, Beedle (2001)) offer long lists of software process methods that balance creation and production. For example.. Manifesto for Agile Software Development: We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. - The need to build creativity sand boxes, where young turks can try (and often die) crazed new ideas, is well recognized at the highest level of large organizations. Standard practice in the field is to fund breakaway start-up companies to try bizarre experimental ideas, on the condition that if the start-up is successful, the main organization can buy back the IP of that start-up. - Advocates of open source development talk about levering the creativity of large groups. Rule 11 of Raymond (2001)'s classic "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", advises "The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better." Raymond also advises us to exploit the serendipitous effects seen when users use a new technology. His rule #14 is "Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected." So creativity can be engineered, and is routinely engineered, in the software engineering community.. But should it be? Why chain up the muse and make her create on demand? Creation can be fun. Should be mechanized, made predictable in some industrial context? Well, any manager of a software game will tell you "yes". The gaming industry has undergone an explosive growth rate and has already over-taken the movie industry in terms of annual income. Yet most games are banal; derivative copies of a limited number of themes developed last century. For every Sim City there are a hundred first-person shooter games. Why? I reject market driven reasons. Not every potential purchaser of a game is a awkward angry teenager with a barely suppressed urge to kill their parents, teachers, bus drivers, who ever. I think games are so derivative because it is so expensive to challenge the form. The gaming toolkits are mostly based on past successful games. Without more creation to drive those toolkits to new areas, we may be doomed to shoot first and ask questions (about more imaginative gaming scenarios) later. So there exists at least one reason for engineering creativity- to give me something better to do on a Saturday night that fighting a digitized version of Rambo. But is there there any evidence that we can effectively engineering creativity? To any individual, creation may feel like a special process but, like Hari Seldon's psycho-history, given a large enough community, then the outputs of that communities creativity and individuality can be predicted. As commented by the Australian Band, the Whitlams in the their song "one in a million: "One In A Million" by the Whitlams Some say, "love it comes once in a lifetime," That's enough for me She was one, one in a million There's five more in New South Wales. Of course there is a minus-one error in this song. As of June 2007 the Australian state of New South Wales has a population of 6,889,100 so now there are nearly seven million candidate "loves of a lifetime", less the "was one" above, leaving six other candidates for soul mates. As with song, so to in industry. There is enough experience in the software world for us to predict the time required to complete a creative process. In my own work I build predictors for the time required to complete software as well the number of bugs expected in the final product, see Menzies (2006,2007). Those predictive models are surprisingly accurate- which would be impossible if the creation process was as individual and idiosyncratic as it is commonly presented. Another advocate of engineering creativity is Richard Florida (2005). In several books, including "The Flight of the Creative Classes", Florida talks about how to engineering the social conditions that attract the small percentage of highly creative people to some local region. His triad is "technology, talent, tolerance". A moderately Bohemian environment, says Florida, is a necessary but not sufficient condition to attract talented software hackers to,say, Silicon value. There, in an environment tolerant of new ideas, this talent can create innovative new technologies. Our 100 hour per week software hacker may never actually go an art gallery, lesbian bar, or join a drum circle but they want to feel that might be able to, if only they can get the next version of the software out the door. So what new technologies are required to support creativity engineering? Well, at lot more could certainly be done but before we rush to build anew, it is useful to understand our current creativity toolbox. - Florida's tools for creating creativity are all to do with social engineering- local school board policies that appeal to Bohemian couples may be as important as Nelson's Project Xanadu. - The open source world has any number of free tools to support large groups working together towards some common ends (blogs, wikis, version control tools, bug reporting systems, code check-in rituals, methods to recognize and reject troublesome individuals from a group, etc). And the last decade has shown just how creative and productive those tools make large groups of programmers. But why do I been write this done? What is at stake here? Who argues that creativity can't be engineered? Well, no less a write that the famed British poet Ted Hughes. Hughes would rebel at the notion that the products of his creativity can be predicted via engineering means. His classic poem "The Thought Fox" offers one view of creation. The paw prints of the thought fox are the marks left behind on a page after that elusive creature has run buy. This thought process is out-of-control to the creator- some primordial force that we cannot command I imagine this midnight moments forest: Something else is alive Beside the clocks loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move. Through the window I see no star: Something more near Though deeper within darkness Is entering the loneliness: In Hughes' view, we must wait patiently for the muse to arrive. No crowd sourcing, no storage of the poem in an on-line version control system, no developers releasing early versions of the poem for others to elaborate. In Hughes' world, the best we can do is to coax creativity into creation- not by action, but by our stillness: Cold, delicately as the dark snow, A foxes nose touches twig, leaf; Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and now Any wrong move on our part and the fox will bolt. We are frozen, like a hunter waiting for a clear shot or a rabbit trying not to draw attention to itself. Richard Florida would not approve of Hughes imaginary landscape- a cold, isolated and lonely place with no art galleries or bookstores to cruise after the poem is written. Across clearings, an eye, A widening deepening greenness, Brilliantly, concentratedly, Coming about its own business In Hughes' world, the artist is like Leonardo DeCaprio watching the in-coming iceberg. We are powerless to bend its business to ours. There are no start-ups we can spin off to explore different poem generation methods. We can't write multiple poems and throw away the one the don't work. All we can do is wait for a wham-bam visit by the muse, running faster than a clock can tick, leaving us reaching for cigarettes. Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed. One can imagine Clint Eastwood playing the Thought Fox, arrogantly gazing at us sweaty and anxious across the clearing, daring us to try anything else except capitulation, interrogating us with "You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya punk?" But even this process (which we might characterize as "please go shiver in the snowy forest of your subconscious till the muse lowers itself to deposit a creative turd in your path") is open to engineering principles. If the average wait time for the muse is M days and the number of required poems is P poems of Quality Q per day and better and better quality poems are less and less likely (and some exponentially decay constant k) then the number of starving artists you need to go shiver in the forest is... well you get the idea. Beedle (2001): M. Beedle et. al., "Manifesto for Agile Software Development", available from \url{http://www.agilemanifesto.org/, 2001 Boehm (1986): B. Boehm, "A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement", Software Engineering Notes, Vol 11, No 4, page=22, 1986. Brooks (1975): F. P. Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month", Addison-Wesley, 1975 Floirda (2005): R. Florida, "The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent". Collins Books. Glass (2007): R.L. Glass, "Software Creativity 2.0" developer.* Books, 2007 Menzies (2006) T, Menzies and Z. Chen and J. Hihn and K. Lum, "Selecting Best Practices for Effort Estimation", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Nov, 2006, Available from http://menzies.us/pdf/06coseekmo.pdf Menzies (2007): T. Menzies and O. Elwaras and J. Hihn and M, Feathear and B. Boehm and R. Madachy, "The Business Case for Automated Software Engineering", IEEE ASE, 2007, Available from \url{http://menzies.us/pdf/07casease-v0.pdf Raymond (2001): E. S. Raymond and B. Young, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary", O'Reilly & Associates, 2001. A short form is available from http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar.