While not always faithful to the professional field of developmental psychology, Howard Gardner treasures the concept of development – which was introduced to him through the writings of Heinz Werner, and was embodied by his first teachers, Jerome Bruner, Erik Erikson, and Jean Piaget. As soon as he joined Project Zero, a research group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Gardner proposed that “participation in the arts” is a viable end-state for a developmental perspective; with Ellen Winner and other colleagues, he sought to lay out a “developmental psychology of the arts.” Drawing on various disciplines, Gardner then introduced the concept for which he is best known –multiple intelligences.  Ironically, “multiple intelligences” does not describe his own mind particularly well. Like most scholars and writers, he traffics in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences.  Instead, his approach is better described as an effort to synthesize bodies of information in a way that is illuminating and that raises new questions, that he and his colleagues can ponder and pursue.

Beyond question, the contribution to psychology for which I am best known is the theory of multiple intelligences. Before turning to that theory, it's important for me to describe my own background and the ways in which I think about the scholarly work that I carry out.

Before going to graduate school in developmental psychology, I had never taken a conventional psychology course. My background was in the broader social sciences, with an emphasis on interpretive social science rather than on experiments or quantitative work. When I began to study developmental psychology, I became fascinated by the work of the great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget considered scientific thinking as the high point of cognitive development. That's one plausible “end state.” But, as a trained musician and a lover of the arts, I wondered how one would construe human development – including cognitive development – if one were to think of “artistic thinking” as the apogee of human cognition.

As a budding scholar interested in the arts – an interest shared at the time by few psychologists – I was uncertain about my next career step. Uncertainty gave way to an unexpected career move when I encountered the literature on damage to the human brain. Without minimizing the tragedy of stroke, trauma, or tumor, any brain damage constitutes an “experiment in nature.” One identifies the type and site of the lesion and ascertains how that lesion affects human cognition. As just one example, damage to the language areas spares the capacity to sing, while damage to the musical areas leaves linguistic capacities unaffected.

I had found a way to study human cognition in the arts. And indeed, for the next twenty years I divided my research time between the Boston Veterans Administration Medical Center, where I studied the effects on artistry of various kinds of brain damage, and Harvard Project Zero, a research center of which I was a founding member, where I studied the development in children of artistic capacities.

In studying the effects of brain damage, I made what I consider to be my most important discovery in scientific psychology. The classical teaching is that, in right-handed persons, language is housed in the left hemisphere; brain damage there produces aphasia (language disability). Neurologists had occasionally observed that, in right-handed persons, damage to the right side of the brain produces an odd set of symptoms.

For a long time, creativity was viewed within psychology as a single undifferentiated capacity. A new mathematical formulation, an arresting work of visual art, and an innovative business strategy were all seen as undergirded by a common creative capacity. In recent decades scholars investigating creativity have focused on the variability among creative individuals and among the circumstances that foster creative accomplishment (Csikszentmihalyi 1996; Feldman, 1999; Gardner, 1993). On this account creativity emerges in an interactive system involving the individual (the creator), the symbol system she or he is engaged in (the domain), and the surrounding social system (the field) (Feldman, Csikszentmihalyi, & Gardner, 1994). Creative breakthroughs in one domain may thus be distinguished from breakthroughs in other domains. Though scholarly tension may remain between the domain specificity and domain generality of creativity within an individual (e.g., Silvia, Kaufman, & Pretz, 2009), we focus the present analysis on the differences across domains and fields.

The issue becomes more complex when we look within domains. Compare, for example, two species of lawyers: (1) a small-town lawyer who works on fairly routine legal tasks, but at the same time needs to understand the dynamics of his local community and address the gamut of personal, legal, and financial issues presented by each of his clients; (2) a mergers-and-acquisitions (M&A) lawyer who collaborates with dozens of associates in developing specialized and innovative strategies for high-stakes business negotiations. These two sub-domains of law draw on different types of creativity and expertise.

In this chapter we introduce a new way of looking at this intersection of creativity and expertise. Donning two lenses of “axis” and “focus,” we characterize differences and similarities in the nature of creative work within and across domains. We look at creativity through the lens of axis, that is, whether creativity in the sub-domain is primarily vertical or primarily horizontal in its orientation (Keinänen, 2003; Keinänen & Gardner, 2004; Li, 1997). In vertical sub-domains, such as legal practice in a small town, creativity occurs within narrow constraints. Lawyers rely heavily on tradition and established practice, and creativity is expressed through elegant, efficient, or convincing use thereof. Conversely, in horizontal sub-domains, such as M&A law, value novelty, and invention – there are fewer preexisting constraints.

For a long time, creativity was viewed within psychology as a single undifferentiated capacity. A new mathematical formulation, an arresting work of visual art, and an innovative business strategy were all seen as undergirded by a common creative capacity. More recently, scholars investigating creativity have focused on the variability among creative individuals and among the circumstances that foster creative accomplishment (Csikszentmihalyi 1996; Feldman, 1999; Gardner, 1993). On this account creativity emerges in an interactive system involving the individual (the creator), the symbol system she or he is engaged in (the domain) and the surrounding social system (the field) (Feldman, Csikszentmihalyi, & Gardner, 1994). Creative breakthroughs in one domain may thus be distinguished from breakthroughs in other domains.

The issue becomes yet more complex when we look within domains. Compare, for example, two species of lawyers: (1) a small-town lawyer who works on fairly routine legal tasks, but at the same time needs to understand the dynamics of his local community and address the gamut of personal, legal, and financial issues presented by each of his clients; and (2) a mergers-and-acquisitions (M&A) lawyer who collaborates with dozens of associates in developing specialized and innovative strategies for high-stakes business negotiations. These two subdomains of law draw on different types of creativity and expertise.

In this chapter we introduce a new way of looking at this intersection of creativity and expertise. Donning two lenses of “axis” and “focus,” we characterize differences and similarities in the nature of creative work within and across domains.