Triangulating the personal creative experience: self-report, external judgments, and physiology

We investigate the measurement of ‘in-the-moment creativity’ (ITMC) as a step towards developing new evaluation methods for improving creativity support tools (CSTs). We consider ITMC to be the periods of intense personal creative experience within a temporal, creative work process. Our approach to this work involves a triangulation method of several temporal metrics, including self-report ratings, external judgments, and physiological measurements. The experiment described in this paper involves participants sketching for 30 minutes while wearing EEG and being screen recorded. Participants and external judges used a special video application to watch, identify and rate periods of personal creative experience during the sketching activity. Our results indicate that people are comfortable self-reporting ITMC, and our work sets the stage for more extensive research that makes use of temporal, granular measures of the personal creative experience.