CCDSF: A Computational Creative Design Systems Framework

From a mixed perspective of the fields of computational creativity and design research, we present a formal framework called Computational Creative Design Systems Framework (CCDSF) for describing, analyzing, and modeling Computational Creative Design Systems (CCDSs), either as autonomous agents or as collaborative systems integrating different agents, including both pure computational and human–computer scenarios. The CCDSF extends and unifies three existing frameworks: (i) the Function–Behavior–Structure framework for designing, to integrate design domain-specific knowledge; (ii) the Creative Systems Framework, to model design as a creative process; and (iii) the Conceptual Spaces Theory framework, to define the CCDSF at a more neutral level to be compatible with both the conceptual-space nature of the creative process and the implementation-level representation systems. The CCDSF core is a layered schema that structures the activity of designing through design concepts produced by design processes instrumented by agent-specific perception and action strategies, within a hierarchy of what we call design levels. Each layer of the schema constitutes a creative system that can implement exploratory, combinational, and transformational creativity mechanisms, including the possibility of defining the system at a meta-creative level. The hierarchical arrangement of creative systems defines the architecture of a CCDS. This architecture enables modeling CCDSs considering both the perspective of the generation and evaluation of artifacts that could be deemed creative and the precise modeling of the cognitive process of design, emphasizing its situated nature. To illustrate its usefulness, in the last part of this paper, we use the proposed framework to describe a real system in the videogame design domain.