Why HCI and Creativity Research Must Collaborate to Develop New Creativity Support Tools

Abstract

Digital creativity support tools (CST) are an integrated part of many professions in the creative industries. While CST play a central role in the daily practices of creative professionals, we have limited understanding of how these tools affect the creative process. This lack is problematic, as the need for designing new CST to help leverage societal challenges continues to grow. Part of the reason for our scarce understanding of CST is an untapped potential for collaboration between two research communities whose joint effort is key to increasing our understanding of the role and nature of CST in creative practices. We review seminal work from creativity-oriented Human-Computer Interaction research (HCI) and psychology-based Creativity Research (CR) to demonstrate a discrepancy between a) HCI's insight into CST practices and technologies, but rather limited awareness of current relevant studies in CR, and, conversely, b) CR's long expertise in psychological studies of creative processes and cognition, but rather limited insight into CST technologies and practices. To help enable mutually complementary collaboration between the two disciplines, we propose four CST-based research initiatives: integration and development of theory, adaptation and development of methods, collection of exemplars and cases, and prototyping of novel CST. We discuss these initiatives in the light of trends in the two research communities, we and suggest potential next steps.