The role of flow experience in a group creativity task, contemporary dance improvisation, was explored through qualitative content analysis. Our focus was upon the creative process itself, rather than upon creative outcomes. Six dancers took part in an improvisation workshop, reflecting on their creative practice and any associated flow. We conducted individual semi-structured interviews with all participants supported by a video-cued recall of experience from the workshop. We interpreted their responses using qualitative content analysis. Effortless attention and enjoyment were predominant themes that emerged from the dancers’ reports while describing the flow. When experienced in collaboration, the flow was described as ‘becoming one with the group’. Dancers commonly associated flow with a highly creative state where they tended to find surprising, very ‘organic and natural’ movement solutions. Moreover, flow and group settings facilitated creativity through maintaining a desired creative focus for longer, lowering self-judgment and inspiring novel solutions. While findings concerning movement may be specific to dance, others are more generic to the process of group creativity. Our results confirm previous findings that associated flow with a state in which the person feels simultaneously cognitively efficient, motivated, and happy, and that these states can be facilitated in groups characterised by trust.

Observing dance improvisation provides a unique opportunity to understand how people collaborate together while creating. It is an opportunity to consider how new ideas appear, not simply from the internal processes of a single creator but rather from the interactions between the minds, bodies and the environment acting on and between a group of improvising dancers. Improvisational scores served in this study as a laboratory into group creativity. Using a video-stimulated recall method, which asks dancers to reflect upon their own processes just after completing the score, I explored the interdependency between meta-cognitive strategies such as imagery and sense awareness, group processes, the role of others in one’s own creative processes, and interactions between bodies and with the environment. As a result I describe how dancers build together a common improvisational space, which allows them to co-create and share their ideas mostly in non-verbal, non-propositional ways. I discuss the co-agency of such a process, showing that intentionality is distributed between dancers at each moment of improvisation and that they are mainly focused on supporting the ideas of others. I also discuss the medium of the body and the embodied response as central to dance improvisation practice.

The EU H2020 RURITAGE project takes 20 case studies, considered to be Role Models (RMs) of successful heritage-led rural regeneration from Europe, to analyze them and transfer knowledge and learning to a network of Replicators (Rs). To quantify the success of these RURITAGE interventions, a monitoring framework has been developed which includes a range of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and a co-monitoring program. This program takes a bottom-up approach working with key stakeholders to understand their values. The My Cult-Rural Toolkit described in this paper has been designed and developed to support the co-monitoring program. The toolkit includes various methods allowing expert and non-expert engagement with the landscape valuation process through embodied and situated approaches. All the co-monitoring tools share the principle of gathering data through real-time interaction in the place of interest, following principles of the embodied approach to ecosystems’ valuation. The toolkit employs both participatory hands-on workshops (Mini-Landscapes, Object Mapping, and Walking Maps) for in-depth understanding of values attached with landscape, and digital mobile apps (Rate my View App and Landscape Connect App) for exploratory, participatory mapping. This paper describes the toolkit and discusses benefits and limitations of its usage in the context of co-monitoring of cultural and natural heritage (CNH) inspired rural change.

Rapid development of information and communications technologies (ICT) has triggered profound changes in how people manage their social contacts in both informal and professional contexts. ICT mediated communication may seem limited in possibilities compared to face-to-face encounters, but research shows that puzzlingly often it can be just as effective and satisfactory. We posit that ICT users employ specific communication strategies adapted to particular communication channels, which results in a comparable effectiveness of communication. In order to maintain a satisfactory level of conversational intelligibility they calibrate the content of their messages to a given medium’s richness and adjust the whole conversation trajectory so that every stage of the communication process runs fluently. In the current study, we compared complex task solving trajectories in chat, mobile phone and face-to-face dyadic conversations. Media conditions did not influence the quality of decision outcomes or users’ perceptions of the interaction, but they had impact on the amount of time devoted to each of the identified phases of decision development. In face-to-face contacts the evaluation stage of the discussion dominated the conversation; in the texting condition the orientation-evaluation-control phases were evenly distributed; and the phone condition provided a midpoint between these two extremes. The results show that contemporary ICT users adjust their communication behavior to the limitations and opportunities of various media through the regulation of attention directed to each stage of the discussion so that as a whole the communication process remains effective.