Materiality as a generative, world-making force in practice: How tools, interfaces, bodies, data, and environments, or matter participates in composing, transforming, and differentiating phenomena in ways that invent possibilities for thought, feeling, and pedagogy.
Creative materiality names a new materialist and posthumanist commitment to the liveliness, inventiveness, and formative force of matter in worldly events. In this register, materials are not passive substrates but active participants in how things come to matter. This insight threads through Haraway’s situated technoscience, where tools, microbes, animals, code, and humans co-compose knowledge and kinship; Bennett’s account of vibrant matter, where everyday things exert force and allure; Massumi’s emphasis on affective, pre-personal intensities that modulate what a body can do; Barad’s agential realism, where material-discursive apparatuses enact cuts that configure phenomena; and Deleuze & Guattari’s account of production as a ceaseless differentiation of forms through assemblages. Creative materiality foregrounds how media, bodies, tools, spaces, and concepts collaborate to produce novelty. In education, this means assignments, platforms, keyboards, prompts, drafts, and rooms are not backdrops to learning but co-actors that shape thought and expression.
Creative materiality also connects to Haraway’s work on situated knowledges and the figure of the cyborg, which invites thinking with hybrid collectives of human and machine, organism and code. Creativity is situated because the conditions of making are partial and located; it is cyborgian because it is composed through heterogeneous couplings that blur boundaries and reconfigure capacities. Rather than treating “creativity” as an inner mental spark, creative materiality tracks how novelty is performed through arrangements of bodies, technologies, and discourses that enable certain moves and foreclose others. In practical terms, it asks: what materials are at work here, what can they do together, and how do their affordances and resistances shape the becoming of ideas, text, and pedagogical practice?
“Materiality” here refers to the concrete stuff of the world—objects, technologies, bodies, environments—and their capacities. “Creative” signals not only human creativity but the way matter itself can initiate, redirect, and amplify processes, yielding outcomes that were not predetermined. Haraway’s slogan “it matters what worlds world worlds” helps translate the point: the specific entanglements of materials and meanings craft the very conditions of experience and knowledge. This is not mysticism; it is a pragmatic, empirical invitation to notice how cables, servers, GUIs, citation managers, electricity, and institutional policies actively contour what writing becomes in a classroom.
Postqualitative inquiry treats methods, instruments, and contexts as part of the phenomenon, not outside it. Creative materiality makes this tangible in design and analysis by attending to the way research tools, writing platforms, and institutional ecologies co-produce possibilities for sense-making. It supports working with assemblages rather than isolating variables; mapping affordances and frictions rather than abstracting them away; and crafting apparatuses that can register weak signals, emergent practices, and material-discursive shifts. It aligns with posthumanist commitments to distributed agency and with new materialist emphases on the performativity of matter, encouraging researchers to document how specific configurations—prompts, sensors, policies, spaces—alter the field of potential and the kinds of insights that can be generated.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, creative materiality highlights how originality and invention emerge from the interplay of prompts, model architectures, interface designs, revision practices, citation infrastructures, and classroom norms. It helps analyze the “feel” of composing with LLMs: how latency, suggestion cadence, input constraints, and interface cues nudge or interrupt a writer’s momentum, and how those micro-material conditions shape voice, argument structure, and risk-taking. It focuses how assignment prompts and rubrics prefigure what creativity can look like in a course, and how tinkering with prompt design, collaborative drafting, or annotation workflows can open different creative pathways. It also foregrounds the ethics and politics of material participation, such as dataset provenance or platform policy, by showing how these conditions inflect what kinds of ideas become writable, shareable, and assessable in particular classrooms.
Creative materiality clarifies how AI models, prompts, citation tools, keyboards, LMS settings, latency, and feedback interfaces co-create writing situations that feel different in the body and produce distinct textual rhythms. Instructors’ experiences with surprise, frustration, relief, or curiosity can be read alongside the tactile and temporal qualities of working with chat interfaces, the sensory feel of iteratively prompting, and the emergent artifacts that result. Authorship and creativity are enacted through these entanglements: prompt engineering becomes a compositional technique, temperature (randomness) settings tune voice and variation, and revision histories reveal shared agency distributed across human and machine. Pedagogically, attention to creative materiality supports designing assignments that stage productive frictions—pairing human freewriting with model “vibing”, composing with multimodal inputs, or constraining features to surface different capacities—so that students encounter writing as an event of co-composition where matter and meaning invent together.