Creative Sense-Making

Creative Sense-Making: Quantifying Interaction Dynamics in Co-Creation

Abstract: This paper describes a new technique for quantifying interaction dynamics during open-ended co-creation, such as collaborative drawing or playing pretend. We present a cognitive framework called creative sense-making. This framework synthesizes existing cognitive science theories and empirical investigations into open-ended improvisation to develop a method of quantifying cognitive states and types of interactions through time. We apply this framework to empirical studies of human collaboration (in the domain of pretend play) and AI-based systems (in the domain of collaborative drawing) to establish its validity through cross-domain application and inter-rater reliability within each domain. The creative sense-making framework described includes a qualitative coding technique, interaction coding software, and the cognitive theory behind their application.

Davis, N., Hsiao, C. P., Singh, K. Y., Lin, B., & Magerko, B. (2017, June). Creative sense-making: Quantifying interaction dynamics in co-creation. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition (pp. 356-366).

Creative Sense-Making: A Cognitivec Framework for Quantifying Interaction Dynamics in Co-Creation

Abstract: The field of computational creativity is beginning to investigate how co-creative agents might interface with the human creative process. These computer colleagues are a mix between creativity support tools helping users achieve creative goals and creative algorithms that generate content autonomously. Computer colleagues have enormous potential because during creative improvisational collaboration, a new form of distributed creativity arises that can lead to emergent, dynamic, and unexpected meaning to support creativity in new ways. However, there is a gap in the literature about cognitive accounts of the interaction dynamics of open-ended creative collab- oration, e.g. the rhythm of interaction, style of turn taking, and manner in which participants are mutually making sense of a situation. An empirically grounded cogni- tive framework would greatly aid in the design and evaluation of co-creative systems. With this dissertation, I begin to address that gap by asking the overarching research question: How do humans collaborate in open-ended improvisational creativity, and how can we design co-creative agents to achieve similar benefits as human collaboration?

Davis, N. M. (2017). Creative sense-making: A cognitive framework for quantifying interaction dynamics in co-creation (Doctoral dissertation, Georgia Institute of Technology).

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