Creativity Support Tools: A Grand Challenge for HCI Researchers

During the past 40 years, computing professionals have been enormously successful in developing productivity support tools for many users, so that they can perform their work more rapidly, effectively, and with fewer errors. Now, computing professionals are turning their attention to developing creativity support tools, which enable users to explore, discover, imagine, innovate, compose, and collaborate (Shneiderman, 2002). The grand challenge for creativity support tool designers is to enable more people to be more creative more of the time (Shneiderman, 2000, von Hippel, 2005). Creativity takes many forms, such as paintings, sculpture, symphonies, songs, poems, plays, and prose. Creativity is also part of the design culture in consumer products, graphics, and architecture, as well as in engineering, software development, and user interface design. Finally, creativity manifests itself in the scientific discoveries of physicists, biologists, chemists, mathematicians, or computer scientists. My concepts of creativity were strongly influenced by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose books include the widely cited Creativity (1996). He describes three key components for understanding creativity: 1. Domain: e.g. mathematics or biology, "consists of a set of symbols, rules and procedures” (creative work is within a domain) 2. Field: "the individuals who act as gatekeepers to the domain...decide whether a new idea, performance, or product should be included” (creative work is social and must be judged by others) 3. Individual: creativity is "when a person... has a new idea or sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion in the relevant domain"