Serendipitous collective creativity at family making programs in public libraries

Collective creativity is increasingly being emphasized, yet there is less focus on serendipitous or accidental collective creativity. Understanding serendipitous collective creativity can bring implications for unexplored ways to facilitate collective creativity in learning settings. This paper reports a video-based study that investigates how moments of serendipitous collective creativity emerge and influence families’ creative experience in informal making programs at public libraries. Twenty-four parent-child pairs’ interaction and creative products are analyzed through interaction analysis and novelty assessment. Our study demonstrates showcasing and providing feedback as two social mechanisms that facilitated moments of serendipitous collective creativity, which influenced families to adopt, expand, and solidify the serendipitous idea. The study brings implications to library professionals who provide educational programming to children and family patrons to reconsider the role of participating families at library making programs as not just patrons but community members with shared ownership to facilitate creative process of one another.