Why Creative Sense-Making?

Rethinking Creativity Through Interaction

Creativity is one of the most studied phenomena in psychology, cognitive science, education, design, and artificial intelligence. Yet despite decades of research, there remains considerable disagreement about where creativity comes from and how it should be understood.

Many traditional theories focus on individuals. Creativity is often explained through internal cognitive processes such as problem-solving, idea generation, divergent thinking, expertise, or insight. Other approaches focus on creative products, evaluating the novelty, usefulness, or quality of completed artifacts. These perspectives have generated important knowledge, but they frequently leave a fundamental question unanswered:

How does creativity emerge through interaction?

Creative Sense-Making was developed to address this question.

Rather than treating creativity as something that occurs solely within the mind of an individual, Creative Sense-Making views creativity as an emergent process that unfolds through ongoing interaction among people, tools, technologies, materials, and environments. Creativity is not simply generated and then expressed. It emerges through participation.


Traditional Approaches to Creativity

Creativity as Individual Cognition

Many influential creativity theories focus on the individual creator.

These approaches investigate:

Such theories have produced valuable insights into how people think creatively. However, they often treat creativity as something that originates within an individual and only later becomes social or collaborative.

Creative Sense-Making argues that this perspective captures only part of the picture. Creative activity frequently unfolds through interaction with other people, materials, environments, and technologies.


Creativity as Product

Another common approach evaluates creativity through outcomes.

Researchers examine:

The resulting products are then judged according to criteria such as novelty, usefulness, or originality.

While outcome-based approaches remain important, they often provide limited insight into the processes that produced those outcomes.

Two creative sessions may generate similar artifacts while involving very different interaction dynamics.

Understanding creativity therefore requires understanding the process as well as the product.


The Interaction-Centered Alternative

Creative Sense-Making begins with a different assumption:

Creativity emerges through interaction.

Ideas do not simply appear fully formed within isolated minds. They develop through engagement with people, environments, materials, technologies, and evolving situations.

Participants continuously:

Creativity emerges through these ongoing cycles of interaction and sense-making.


Why Interaction Matters

Creativity Is Participatory

Creative work rarely occurs in isolation.

Writers interact with language.

Designers interact with materials.

Artists interact with media.

Teams interact with one another.

Humans increasingly interact with AI systems.

These interactions shape what becomes possible.

From the perspective of Creative Sense-Making, creativity is fundamentally participatory rather than purely individual.


Meaning Emerges Through Engagement

Creative activity involves more than generating ideas.

Participants continually construct meaning through interaction.

As interactions unfold:

Meaning is not simply discovered. It is actively constructed through participation. This perspective draws inspiration from theories of sense-making and participatory sense-making that emphasize the role of interaction in the emergence of understanding.


Human-AI Creativity Requires New Frameworks

The rise of co-creative AI systems has further exposed the limitations of purely individualistic theories of creativity.

When humans and AI systems collaborate:

Creative Sense-Making provides a framework for understanding these emerging forms of co-creation and human-AI partnership.


What Creative Sense-Making Contributes

Creative Sense-Making extends creativity research by shifting attention toward interaction itself.

The framework provides:

A Theory

Creativity as an emergent process of participatory interaction.

A Methodology

Quantified Co-Creation for studying creative interaction through time.

A Visualization Framework

Sense-Making Curves for representing interaction dynamics.

A Research Platform

Tools and systems such as Codix, Drawing Apprentice, and AI Drawing Partner for investigating co-creative processes.


From Individuals to Interactions

Creative Sense-Making does not reject traditional creativity theories.

Instead, it expands them.

Individual cognition remains important.

Creative products remain important.

However, between the individual and the product lies a rich world of interaction dynamics that shape how creativity emerges, evolves, and becomes meaningful.

The central insight of Creative Sense-Making is simple:

To understand creativity, we must understand interaction.

Creativity is not merely something people possess.

It is something that emerges through participation in a continually evolving world.