Creativity Support Tools Research Articles

A creativity support tool for cognitive idea stimulation in entrepreneurial activities

Entrepreneurship requires creative approaches to tackle many challenges faced in establishing a new business. Recognising opportunities and developing ideas requires entrepreneurs to be creative in order to establish beneficial business models. Actively supporting the creative process can therefore result in enhanced ideas. Within this article, we discuss the relevance of creativity support and the use of information technology to support entrepreneurial creativity. As part of the applied design science research methodology, we developed a creativity support tool, which aims to support the divergent thinking process, which has been identified to be especially important for entrepreneurial ideation. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the efficiency of our artefact. The results indicate that the artefact, which automatically presents external word stimuli to the idea generator, is able to enhance creativity, expand the entrepreneur's solution space and supports the recognition of more idea aspects.

A creativity support tool for cognitive idea stimulation in entrepreneurial activities

Entrepreneurship requires creative approaches to tackle many challenges faced in establishing a new business. Recognising opportunities and developing ideas requires entrepreneurs to be creative in order to establish beneficial business models. Actively supporting the creative process can therefore result in enhanced ideas. Within this article, we discuss the relevance of creativity support and the use of information technology to support entrepreneurial creativity. As part of the applied design science research methodology, we developed a creativity support tool, which aims to support the divergent thinking process, which has been identified to be especially important for entrepreneurial ideation. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the efficiency of our artefact. The results indicate that the artefact, which automatically presents external word stimuli to the idea generator, is able to enhance creativity, expand the entrepreneur's solution space and supports the recognition of more idea aspects.

Beyond Interactive Evolution: Expressing Intentions Through Fitness Functions

Photogrowth is a creativity support tool for the creation of nonphotorealistic renderings of images. The authors discuss its evolution from a generative art application to an interactive evolutionary art tool and finally into a meta-level interactive art system in which users express their artistic intentions through the design of a fitness function. The authors explore the impact of these changes on the sense of authorship, highlighting the range of imagery that can be produced by the system.

Information and interaction requirements for software tools supporting analogical design

AbstractOne mode of creative design is for designers to draw analogies that connect the design domain (e.g., a mechanical device) to some other domain from which inspiration is drawn (e.g., a biological system). The identification and application of analogies can be supported by software tools that store, structure, present, or propose source domain stimuli from which such analogies might be constructed. For these tools to be effective and not impact the design process in negative ways, they must fit well with the information and interaction needs of their users. However, the user requirements for these tools are seldom explicitly discussed. Furthermore, the literature that supports the identification of such requirements is distributed across a number of different domains, including those that address analogical design (especially biomimetics), creativity support tools, and human–computer interaction. The requirements that these literatures propose can be divided into those that relate to the information content that the tools provide (e.g., level of abstraction or mode of representation) and those that relate to the interaction qualities that the tools support (e.g., accessibility or shareability). Examining the relationships between these requirements suggests that tool developers should focus on satisfying the key requirements of open-endedness and accessibility while managing the conflicts between the other requirements. Attention to these requirements and the relationships between them promises to yield analogical design support tools that better permit designers to identify and apply source information in their creative work.

Quantifying the Creativity Support of Digital Tools through the Creativity Support Index

Creativity support tools help people engage creatively with the world, but measuring how well a tool supports creativity is challenging since creativity is ill-defined. To this end, we developed the Creativity Support Index (CSI), which is a psychometric survey designed for evaluating the ability of a creativity support tool to assist a user engaged in creative work. The CSI measures six dimensions of creativity support: Exploration, Expressiveness, Immersion, Enjoyment, Results Worth Effort, and Collaboration. The CSI allows researchers to understand not just how well a tool supports creative work overall, but what aspects of creativity support may need attention. In this article, we present the CSI, along with scenarios for how it can be deployed in a variety of HCI research settings and how the CSI scores can help target design improvements. We also present the iterative, rigorous development and validation process used to create the CSI.

Affective design of products using an audio-based protocol: Application to eyeglass frame

The measurement and understanding of user emotions elicited by product appearance are critical elements of the product development process. This paper proposes a new emotion measurement method, called Auditory Parameter Method. It is a non-verbal technique that uses auditory stimuli (music samples) and association tests for evaluating a set of products, given by their pictures. From user-tests, it provides an assessment of these products according to a series of emotional dimensions. We present the methodological framework used to build the links between user's emotional responses and geometrical features of the products. The method is described on an application case, an eyeglass frame. Analysis of Variance models are employed to examine how various shape factors influence users' emotional responses. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our protocol, we compare the proposed method with the conventional Semantic Differential using Principal Component Analysis and Generalized Procrustes Analysis. The new protocol demonstrates interesting qualities for collecting the intuitive emotions of users and for providing a discriminant measurement of emotions. It can also be used by designers to stimulate creativity. Relevance to industryThis study presents a methodology to the integration of emotional qualities in the design of products, which taking into account the cognitive and affective processing of users. This very innovative emotion assessment method incorporates the modality of sound, thus complementing research in the field which so far focused on the modality of sight. The design knowledge gained from this method, like the semantic mappings and the interpretation of design attributes, makes it possible to benefit the activity of the designers as a creativity support tool.

Conceptual Recombination: A method for producing exploratory and transformational creativity in creative works

Computational creativity researchers have long been searching for a reliable creative method of generating transformational creativity in Creativity Support Tools, in vain, especially when these systems are supposed to take in a user’s unfinished creative work and produce representational and creative outputs as continuations to the user input. In this paper we propose a new creative method called Conceptual Recombination to take up this challenge. We first define creative work for this study followed by creative work ontology to be the theoretical background of Conceptual Recombination. We further refer to application ontology and regard Conceptual Recombination as the task model for creative work ontology. In this task model there are three levels of prediction leading to the formations of output features, output structures, and their combinations as the final system outputs constrained by rules, biases, and homeomorphism. Furthermore, this new creative method allows the use of exploratory creativity on structures and transformational creativity on features to attain a balance between usefulness and novelty in system outputs. A 7-tuple computational model and the search mechanisms for exploratory and transformational creativity are also defined for it. Lastly, we evaluate Conceptual Recombination with our case study about producing a 2-dimensional asymmetrical shape with a given symmetrical shape to demonstrate its practicality and conclude that it not only offers a new reliable creative method for Creativity Support Tools, but also provides an objective evaluation method for transformational creativity.

Design Creativity: Mechanism, Tools and Applications

In the 1950 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, Guilford (1950) emphasized the importance of creativity research and urged researchers to adopt scientific approaches to the topic. Today, creativity has become one of the most popular and significant research topics, crossing disciplinary boundaries. This issue consists of five papers exploring creativity from different perspectives. The first two papers study creativity related problems from cognitive perspective; the next two papers focus on development of creativity support tools and the last paper explores the link between creativity and humour. Divergent thinking has long been associated with creativity. The paper titled “When does a paper clip become a sundial? Exploring the progression of originality in the alternative uses test” aims to understand how the Alternative Uses Test relates to originality. The Alternative Uses Test is a divergent thinking test in which the testees are asked to list unusual uses for an ordinary object. In the experiment, the authors asked 293 participants to list alternative uses of a paper clip as many as they can in three minutes. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, the analysis shows that participants who generate more ideas have more original ideas and the first nine responses are less likely to be original. Based on this result, the authors suggest that experimenters should not limit the examinees’ responses to 6 items for the Alternative Uses Test as in its current version. Responders should be required to produce at least 9 ideas to ensure the originality of the idea. The same advice goes to a brainstorming meeting where the chair should encourage participants to think of at least 9 responses. Second, from the analysis of the test, the authors create a database that can be used in scoring the digital format of the Alternative Uses Test in real time. The second paper titled “Considering confirmation bias in design and design research” studies confirmation bias, a cognitive factor that obscures creativity. In the paper, the authors explore the prevalence of confirmation bias in design and design research. Confirmation bias is a tendency to validate beliefs rather than invalidate them. Confirmation bias is one of the factors leading to failures of adopting appropriate design solutions because designers tend to accept a design that they believe. Designers justify their choice by relying on supporting evidence and underrating, or even overlooking, conflicting evidence. Confirmation bias can also influence design researchers. To investigate this phenomenon, the authors asked sixteen researchers to evaluate a hypothesis using given data. The participants are divided into two groups: one group uses decision matrix to evaluate the data and the other group does not use any method. The result reveals that most of the subjects in the intuition group (no method) confirms that the hypothesis is true and their evaluation is bias towards confirming evidence. In contrast, the matrix group shows similar responses to the ideal answers. From this study, the authors address the possible impact of confirmation bias on scientific research and review methods to mitigate the effect.

Creativity-centred design for ubiquitous musical activities: Two case studies

This study is among the first that attempt to define a methodology for creativity-centred software design in educational contexts, more specifically for musical activities in ubiquitous settings. We propose and apply a set of design techniques – the Ubimus Planning and the Ubimus Design protocols – as alternatives to experimental procedures that leave out relevant aspects of social and procedural dimensions in educational research. Two workshops were conducted to assess both technological and domain-specific requirements for support of creative musical activities. The first workshop was conducted with music teachers and school teachers that had no formal musical training. The objective of this workshop was to assess domain-specific requirements for musical creative activities by educational staff. The second workshop focused on technological support for tool development by non-musicians. This workshop yielded two software projects that involved user evaluations of creative processes. Participants in t e corresponding user studies included both musicians and non-musicians. The Ubimus Planning protocol served to raise important questions regarding technological usage by musicians and naive subjects in educational contexts. Non-technical approaches, such as those proposed by traditional soundscape activities, may not be suited for introducing non-musicians to sonic composition. Naive subjects may respond better to technologically based approaches, such as those used in ecocomposition.The Ubimus Design approach proved to be effective to test the usability of musical tools at early stages of development. Prototypes were implemented and usability studies were carried out by undergraduate IT students within a three-week time slot. Sharp differences were observed in the type of requirements expressed by musicians and non-musicians regarding creativity support tools. Nevertheless, both groups of subjects assessed the use of software prototypes within exploratory musical activities as being fun and expressive.

Designing a graphical interface for creativity support tools for designers: a case study

This study proposes a co-designing, an iterative methodology to design graphical user interface for creativity support tools for designers. Given the high level of expectation from designers, the interface quality was one of the most challenging aspects of the work, in conjunction with the utility of the functionalities. An iterative design and evaluation process was used to create the icon-based interface, during which the needs of the designers and the functionalities of the system were integrated until a complete operational prototype emerged. This process provided three sequential prototypes. In order to achieve this, we derived qualitative and quantitative results from various methods: creative sessions, semantic and emotional evaluations, questionnaires, semi-directive interviews, subjective performance assessments, longitudinal tests, and focus group assessments. Finally, our iterative design and evaluation process can be considered to be a very efficient means of integrating end users' spontaneous feedback about icon redesigns in the early phases of development. The design outcome enabled the end users to ensure that key features of the creativity support tool were both usable and appealing.

A Context Aware Recommender System for Creativity Support Tools

A Context Aware Recommender System for Creativity Support Tools

FreePub: Collecting and Organizing Scienti*c Material Using Mindmaps

AbstractThis paper presents a creativity support tool, called FreePub,to collect and organize scientifi*c material using mindmaps. Mindmaps are visual, graph-based representations of concepts, ideas, notes, tasks, etc. They generally take a hierarchical or tree branch format, with ideas branching into their subsections. FreePub supports creativity cycles. A user starts such a cycle by setting up her domain of interest using mindmaps. Then, she can browse mindmaps and launch search tasks to gather relevant publications from several data sources. FreePub, besides publications, identifies helpful supporting material (e.g., blog posts, presentations). All retrieved information from FreePub can be imported and organized in mindmaps. FreePub has been fully implemented on top of FreeMind, a popular open-source, mindmapping tool.

FreePub: Collecting and Organizing Scienti*c Material Using Mindmaps

This paper presents a creativity support tool, called FreePub,to collect and organize scientifi*c material using mindmaps. Mindmaps are visual, graph-based representations of concepts, ideas, notes, tasks, etc. They generally take a hierarchical or tree branch format, with ideas branching into their subsections. FreePub supports creativity cycles. A user starts such a cycle by setting up her domain of interest using mindmaps. Then, she can browse mindmaps and launch search tasks to gather relevant publications from several data sources. FreePub, besides publications, identifies helpful supporting material (e.g., blog posts, presentations). All retrieved information from FreePub can be imported and organized in mindmaps. FreePub has been fully implemented on top of FreeMind, a popular open-source, mindmapping tool.

CombinFormation

combinFormation is a mixed-initiative creativity support tool for searching, browsing, organizing, and integrating information. Images and text are connected to represent surrogates (enhanced bookmarks), optimizing the use of human cognitive facilities. Composition, an alternative to lists and spatial hypertext, is used to represent a collection of surrogates as a connected whole, using principles from art and design. This facilitates the creative process of information discovery , in which humans develop new ideas while finding and collecting information. To provoke the user to think about the large space of potentially relevant information resources, a generative agent proactively engages in collecting information resources, forming image and text surrogates, and composing them visually. The agent develops the collection and its visual representation over time, enabling the user to see ideas and relationships. To keep the human in control, we develop interactive mechanisms for authoring the composition and directing the agent. In a field study in an interdisciplinary course on The Design Process, over a hundred students alternated using combinFormation and Google+Word to collect prior work on information discovery invention assignments. The students that used combinFormation's mixed-initiative composition of image and text surrogates performed better.

Translating experience

This paper describes research investigating the significance of physical experience and materiality in creative digital visual art and design practice. Findings are presented from a recent phenomenological study, which indicates the ways in which memory of lived experience informs creative cognition and feeds the imagination. The importance of physical engagement with the world, through the senses, enables emotional expression to be made in artworks that can be perceived by both artist and audience. Digital creativity support tools have been found, in this research, to lack interfaces that facilitate the translation of these visual aesthetic qualities in the virtual representation. Hand use and the sense of touch stimulate novel ideas and enable practitioners to break from fixated thinking when working with digital design tools. Examples of artworks are presented that illustrate ways in which artists, working with digital technology, make use of physical experience to inform visual ideas and innovate design solutions. Case study research is described that illuminates the ways in which memory of physical bodily experience and the time related factors involved in making by hand are crucial within the creative process. Findings from this research are presented that reveal the importance of physical interaction with the world when working creatively with digital design tools.

Designing for Creativity in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work

We are investigating the design of tools to support everyday scientific creativity in distributed collaboration. Based on an exegesis of theoretical and empirical literature on creativity and group dynamics, we present and justify three requirements for supporting creativity: support for divergent and convergent thinking, development of shared objectives, and reflexivity. We elaborate on these requirements by describing three implications for design to support creativity in context of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW): integrate support for individual, dyadic, and group brainstorming; leverage cognitive conflict by preserving and reflecting on minority dissent; and support flexibility in granularity of planning. We conclude by outlining a future research trajectory for designing and evaluating creativity support tools in the context of collaboratories.

Group Creativity in Interaction: Collaborative Referencing, Remembering, and Bridging

Understanding collective creativity is crucial for advancing the general study of human creativity as well as for guiding the design of creativity support tools for small teams and larger collectivities. In this article, we present a qualitative case study of collective creativity online, derived from an analysis of collaborative interactions of virtual teams of students working in the field of mathematics. We examine group creative activity broadly, ranging from the micro-level co-construction of novel resources for team problem solving to the evolutionary reuse of ideas and solution strategies across teams. Our analysis focuses on describing the relationship between the dynamics of creative work present in a single collaborative episode of an online group and their evolution across time and across collectivities. Our analysis indicates that the synergy between these two types of interactions and the resulting creative engagement of the teams relies on three fundamental processes: (a) indexical referencing, (b) group remembering, and (c) bridging across discontinuities.

Creativity support tools: accelerating discovery and innovation

How can designers of programming interfaces, interactive tools, and rich social environments enable more people to be more creative more often?

Representing Collections as Compositions to support distributed creative cognition and situated creative learning

We investigate how the creativity support tool combinFormation supports the creativity-oriented course, The Design Process, by representing collections as compositions. Undergraduate students in The Design Process are charged with working in interdisciplinary teams to develop new inventions. combinFormation is a mixed-initiative system that integrates browsing, searching, representing, manipulating, and collecting digital information resources, using the form of the visual composition space. Students use the composition space to develop collections of prior work that support their creative processes of developing new inventions. A quantitative study shows the overall effect of mixed-initiative composition on the performance of student groups on creative projects. To understand the mechanisms of situated creativity support, we follow-up with case-study interviews of two project teams. We develop the frameworks of distributed creative cognition and situated creative learning to analyse the interview data. We find that the mixed-initiative capabilities of procedural generation and human manipulability of visual information representations in the composition space support distributed creative cognition and situated creative learning.

Supporting creative and reflective processes

Creativity has long been seen as a mysterious process. A better understanding of the nature of creativity and the processes that underpin it are needed in order to be able to make contributions to the design of creativity support tools. In this paper, current theories of creativity and models of the creative process are discussed and an empirical study outlined of participants individually and collaboratively undertaking two creative tasks in different domains. The tasks ‘write a poem’ and ‘design a poster’ were carried out via two media; pen and paper and with the use of a computer and software tools. Schön's theory of reflection-in-action is applied to the study results. The research has generated software requirements for tools to support these specific creative tasks, and also initial design features to enable support for group reflection of evolving creative artefacts.