Transformational Creativity (Boden)

Transformational creativity does not search within a conceptual space or connect between spaces. It changes the space. The invention of atonality in music, the development of cubism in painting, the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, the formulation of quantum mechanics — each transformed the conceptual space so profoundly that the new possibilities were literally unimaginable within the old framework. The mode is the most demanding of Boden's three because it requires capacities machines have not demonstrated: recognizing that a current framework is inadequate, imagining a framework that does not yet exist, and evaluating whether the proposed new framework is genuinely better. These are capacities of consciousness — of asking, wondering, caring about the adequacy of one's own tools of thought — and they remain, by Boden's reckoning, the most distinctly human mode of creative production.