Analytics of Organized Spontaneity: Rethinking Participant Selection, Interaction Format, and Milieu for Academic Forums
Harmeet Sawhney
In an effort to enhance the odds of “organized spontaneity” the paper advances analytics for selection of participants, format of interaction, and milieu within which the interaction occurs. The analysis proceeds in a two-part process. First, three creative environments far removed from the present day academic forums – eighteenth-century French salons, the eighteenth-century London coffeehouses, and Mensa – are examined to generate analytical distance from our current practices. Second, with these three locales in the background, current practices are analyzed and following thoughts are offered for deliberation: (1) Low threshold to entry is not necessarily a bad thing, (2) Creative environments require an artful mix of homogeneity and heterogeneity, (3) Sociality, which is essential for a creative environment, limits the extent to which a disagreement can be pushed, (4) The selection-format-milieu interaction greatly shapes the character of what gets produced in a creative environment.