Twenty Years of Creativity Research in Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract

Creativity has been a growing topic in the ACM community since the 1990s; however, no clear overview of this trend has been offered. We present a thorough survey of 998 creativity-related publications in the ACM Digital Library collected using keyword search to determine prevailing approaches, topics, and characteristics of creativity- oriented Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. A selected sample based on yearly citations yielded 221 publications, which were analyzed using constant comparison analysis. We found that HCI is almost exclusively responsible for creativity-oriented publications; they focus on collaborative creativity rather than individual creativity; there is a general lack of definition of the term 'creativity'; empirically based contributions are prevalent; and many publications focus on new tools, often developed by researchers. On this basis, we present three implications for future creativity-oriented HCI research: develop and employ clearer definitions of creativity; go beyond in-vitro studies of novel tools; and move toward interdisciplinary research collaborations.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 111 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.