Characteristics of applications that support creativity

Creativity typically involves some novel change to a symbolic domain and the production of some artifact judged by domain experts, in some manner, to be creative [1, 2]. An understanding of basic principles and preexisting knowledge helps one know what, when, where, and how to tweak a pattern in order to produce something creative. Creative tweaks may be seen in art, in science, and indeed, in everyday life. The role of preexisting knowledge is recognized as critical to evaluation in one of the more formal mechanisms for recognizing creative inventions—patents. While patentable inventions must be sufficiently creative and novel, they must also be described well enough for someone skilled in the art to be able to build them. Having an environment where it is easy to learn, in which existing bodies of knowledge can be readily accessed, examined, visualized, related, and discussed, would seem to be a key component in enabling creativity. Shneiderman [7, 8] talks of these aspects in terms of a “genex framework” in which there are four phases for generating excellence: collect, relate, create, and donate. He also describes a number of primary activities that occur in those phases that could potentially be supported by computer tools. Computer tools can facilitate creativity on at least two fairly distinct levels: they can aid in knowledge gathering, knowledge sharing, knowledge integration, and ultimately, idea generation; and they can enable the generation of creative artifacts in a particular domain by providing critical functionality in clear, direct, and useful ways. The optimal computer tool will provide support on both of these levels and indeed, provide seamless integration between them. The Cognitive HCI department at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center has developed various tools and systems that could be differentiated by the nature of their target audiences and the kinds of activities in which the users are engaged. On the one hand, tools (the ITS system, [9]) were developed for the application designer/developer. The goal of these tools was to support the development of creative end-user systems. On the other hand, a number of highly used and wellreceived public access systems were designed and developed using these tools. Several of these systems were aimed at engendering creativity in their end users [3–6]. This work, spanning more than a decade, has helped yield insights into the kind of environment—both social and technological—that encourages and supports creativity [4].