Creative Sense-Making

A Framework for Understanding Creativity as Emergent Interaction

Creativity is often described as the generation of novel ideas within the mind of an individual. Creative Sense-Making begins with a different assumption: creativity emerges through interaction. Rather than viewing creativity as a purely internal cognitive process, Creative Sense-Making understands creative thought, discovery, and innovation as products of ongoing engagement between individuals, environments, tools, and other participants.

Developed through research in human-computer interaction, creativity support tools, cognitive science, and human-AI co-creation, Creative Sense-Making provides a framework for understanding how novel possibilities emerge through dynamic processes of perception, action, reflection, and adaptation. Creativity is not simply the production of ideas; it is a form of sense-making through which individuals and groups actively construct meaning while responding to an evolving world.

This perspective shifts attention away from isolated creators and toward the interactions that give rise to creative outcomes. Whether occurring between people, between humans and AI systems, or within larger social and technological environments, creativity can be understood as a process of participatory engagement that unfolds through time. As interactions evolve, opportunities emerge, constraints appear, expectations shift, and new possibilities become visible. Novelty arises not from a single moment of inspiration, but from the continual negotiation between participants and the worlds they help create.

Creative Sense-Making provides both a theoretical framework and an analytical methodology for studying these processes. Through concepts such as interaction dynamics, quantified co-creation, and sense-making curves, the framework offers tools for understanding how creativity emerges, stabilizes, transforms, and evolves through interaction.

The result is a view of creativity that is relational, dynamic, measurable, and fundamentally participatory. See the 'Origins' page for a historical overview of the Creative Sense-Making cognitive framework.

Why It Matters

Creativity is Interaction

Creative outcomes emerge through engagement with people, environments, materials, technologies, and evolving situations. Creativity is not confined to the mind; it unfolds through participation.

Novelty Emerges Through Participation

New ideas often arise through exploration, experimentation, and response rather than through isolated invention. Novel possibilities become visible through interaction.

Meaning is Co-Created

Creative work involves the continual construction of shared meaning. Individuals, groups, and increasingly AI systems contribute to the emergence of new interpretations, understandings, and directions.

Explore the Framework

Origins

Discover the history and development of Creative Sense-Making, from its foundations in creativity research and human-computer interaction to its application in co-creative AI systems.

Sense-Making Curves

Learn how interaction dynamics can be visualized through trajectories of exploration, coordination, novelty, and stabilization.

Quantified Co-Creation

Explore methods for measuring and analyzing interaction dynamics during creative collaboration.

Interaction Dynamics

Understand the patterns, transitions, and behaviors that emerge as participants engage in creative activity together.

Applications

See how Creative Sense-Making informs human-AI co-creation, creativity support tools, design, education, innovation, and collaborative systems.

Publications

Browse foundational papers, dissertations, research articles, and ongoing work that contribute to the Creative Sense-Making research program.

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 Cognitive 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).