Twenty Years of Creativity Research in Human-Computer Interaction (original) (raw)

Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference

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 creativityoriented 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.