The Origins of Creative Sense-Making

Creative Sense-Making emerged from a fundamental question:

How does creativity emerge through interaction?

During the early development of co-creative systems and computational creativity research, much of the field focused on creative products, autonomous generation, or the cognitive processes occurring within individual minds. While these approaches produced important insights, they often overlooked the dynamic interactions through which creativity actually unfolds. Creative collaboration is not simply the exchange of ideas between independent agents. It is an evolving process of participation, adaptation, negotiation, and mutual influence through which new meanings, possibilities, and directions emerge.

The Creative Sense-Making framework was developed to address this gap. Drawing upon cognitive science, enaction, participatory sense-making, creativity research, and human-computer interaction, the framework reconceptualized creativity as a dynamic process of interaction rather than solely an internal process of idea generation. Instead of asking how individuals generate creative ideas, Creative Sense-Making asks how participants collaboratively construct meaning and possibility through ongoing engagement with one another and their environments. The Creative Sense-Making framework has roots in collaborative drawing, pretend play, human-AI collaboration, interaction dynamics, and enactive cognition. 

This research trajectory began through investigations of open-ended improvisational collaboration, including pretend play, collaborative drawing, and human-AI creative partnerships. These early studies revealed that many of the most important aspects of creativity were not located within individual participants but emerged through the evolving interaction itself. The challenge, however, was that these interaction dynamics were difficult to observe, describe, and measure systematically.

To address this challenge, Creative Sense-Making introduced a theoretical and methodological framework for quantifying interaction dynamics through time. The framework combined cognitive theory, interaction coding methods, visualization techniques, and computational analysis to make creative interaction observable and measurable. This work ultimately led to the development of Sense-Making Curves, Quantified Co-Creation, interaction coding tools, and later systems such as Drawing Apprentice, AI Drawing Partner, and Codix.

The timeline below traces the evolution of Creative Sense-Making from its origins in collaborative drawing research through the development of a broader research program focused on interaction dynamics, co-creative systems, human-AI collaboration, and the scientific study of creativity as an emergent process of participation.

What began as an effort to understand creative collaboration has grown into a larger investigation of how people, technologies, and environments participate together in the emergence of meaning, novelty, and creative possibility.