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 co...

Preliminary analysis of data collected from trained expert facilitators of ad hoc creative teams suggests that complex analytical techniques such as costed function modeling and decision criteria matrix may have far more impact upon a team's creative effectiveness than frequently researched measures such as idea quantity. An intriguing relationship in these data between complex creativity and t...

Creativity, one of the hallmarks of the human spirit, has yet to travel deep into the domain of artificial intelligence and computers. We argue that creativity intrinsically requires and exploits complexity. The dynamic multilevel properties of complex systems give us a natural way of scaling creative solutions, from the everyday to the paradigm shift. In particular, the complexity model implie...

Creativity is one of the most important cognitive skills in our complex and fast-changing world. Previous correlative evidence showed that gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is involved in divergent but not convergent thinking. In the current study, a placebo/sham-controlled, randomized between-group design was used to test a causal relation between vagus nerve and creativity. We employed transcuta...

This paper is exploring correlations in the creative process of algorithmic composition in both architecture and music. It is product of a collaborative effort between the two disciplines, aiming to inform architects and composers about similarities and differences of the creative process. More specifically the attempt is to investigate the dynamic transformation of a composition through its en...

We are exploring new roles for interactive systems in supporting creative processes and aiding in idea formation. combinFormation is an interactive system that uses the information resources of the internet to promote creative thinking. Image and text representations are collected and manipulated in a composition space, which invokes complementary human cognitive subsystems to promote understan...

The ability to be creative is often considered a unique characteristic of conscious beings and many efforts have been directed at demonstrating a relationship between creativity and the personality construct of psychoticism. The present study sought to investigate this link explicitly by focusing on discrete facets of creative cognition, namely the originality/novelty dimension and the practica...

People often reject creative ideas, even when espousing creativity as a desired goal. To explain this paradox, we propose that people can hold a bias against creativity that is not necessarily overt and that is activated when people experience a motivation to reduce uncertainty. In two experiments, we manipulated uncertainty using different methods, including an uncertainty-reduction prime. The...