Guiding Computational Design Creativity Research

As the existence of creativity is a judgment, relative to personal or group norms it is helpful to understand what factors inform that judgment. Creativity can be assessed using either the designed product or the design process. Judging the process is much more problematic than judging the product. Besemer’s Creative Product Semantic Scale for product assessment provides three dimensions, with nine attributes that can be used for judgments. As expected, “novelty” is one of the dimensions, but its three attributes provide more subtlety. This paper discusses how creative product assessment scales might provide important clues about how computational systems can be built or controlled in order to produce creative products.