Publications

Building a Science of Creative Interaction

The publications collected here document the development of Creative Sense-Making as a research program spanning creativity research, cognitive science, human-computer interaction, computational creativity, co-creative systems, and human-AI collaboration.

Although these works address diverse domains—including collaborative drawing, pretend play, embodied improvisation, creativity support tools, co-creative AI, and interaction analysis—they are united by a common question:

How does creativity emerge through interaction?

Traditional approaches to creativity often focus on individuals, internal cognitive processes, or completed creative products. The research presented here takes a different perspective. Rather than treating creativity as something generated solely within isolated minds, these publications investigate creativity as an emergent process of participation, collaboration, and evolving sense-making. Across this work, interaction becomes the primary unit of analysis. Creativity is understood not simply as the production of novel artifacts, but as the dynamic process through which people, technologies, environments, and increasingly AI systems construct meaning together through time.

Several major themes connect the publications on this page:

Creative Sense-Making

The foundational Creative Sense-Making framework introduced a new approach for understanding creativity as an interactive process of meaning construction and participatory engagement. Drawing upon enaction and participatory sense-making, the framework provided both a cognitive theory and a methodology for investigating open-ended collaboration.

Quantifying Interaction Dynamics

A central contribution of this research program has been the development of methods for making creative interaction observable and measurable. Through interaction coding techniques, Sense-Making Curves, and trajectory analysis, these publications explore how collaborative processes can be visualized and analyzed through time.

Co-Creative Systems

Many of these works investigate how computational systems can participate in creative activity alongside humans. Projects such as Drawing Apprentice and AI Drawing Partner served as experimental platforms for studying collaboration, turn-taking, mutual influence, improvisation, and the emergence of shared meaning between human and artificial agents.

From Creativity to Interaction-Centered Intelligence

Over time, the scope of the research expanded beyond creativity alone. The publications increasingly investigate broader questions concerning interaction dynamics, collaborative emergence, participatory cognition, adaptive systems, and human-AI co-creation. This trajectory has contributed to the development of larger frameworks for understanding intelligence, creativity, and meaning as emergent properties of interaction rather than solely internal computation.

Taken together, these publications represent an ongoing effort to build a science of creative interaction. They explore how creativity emerges through participation, how interaction dynamics can be measured and visualized, and how humans and intelligent systems can collaborate to generate novel forms of meaning, understanding, and creative possibility.