On the Role of Computers in Creativity-Support Systems

Abstract

We report here on our experiences with designing computer-based creativity-support systems over several years. In particular, we present the design of three different systems incorporating different mechanisms of creativity. One of them uses an idea proposed by Rodari to stimulate imagination of the children in writing a picture-based story. The second one is aimed to model creativity in legal reasoning, and the third one uses low-level perceptual similarities to stimulate creation of novel conceptual associations in unrelated pictures. We discuss lessons learnt from these approaches, and address their implications for the question of how far creativity can be tamed by algorithmic approaches.

On the Role of Computers in Creativity-Support Systems

“…We have been studying and modeling different aspects of creativity for over twenty years [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. During this time, we have also explored various computational approaches to creativity, and have developed some computational systems that stimulate imagination and emergence of novel ideas and associations in the users, or model such processes.…”

“…Each child (in random order) repeats this process, except that all the subsequent children have to continue the story generated so far by incorporating the picture they just turned over. This process is akin to generating novel and creative metaphors by combining unrelated words or concepts together [29].…”

“…The main idea behind this approach was that creative insights often come from applying the high-level structure (or gestalt) of one situation to the low-level details of another situation. The distinction between the levels (high and low levels) is important, for if both the situations are considered from a high level, then only traditional analogy can result, which, as far as creativity is concerned, is counterproductive (see [24,29] for detailed arguments with examples). We explain this approach with an example below.…”