Creative processes unfold through time.
People explore ideas, coordinate with collaborators, encounter surprises, revise their understanding, and generate new possibilities. These dynamic processes are often difficult to observe directly. Traditional creativity research frequently focuses on final outcomes while overlooking the evolving interactions that give rise to them.
Sense-Making Curves provide a way to visualize these interaction dynamics.
Developed within the Creative Sense-Making framework, Sense-Making Curves transform sequences of interactions into trajectories that reveal how creative processes evolve through time. Rather than treating creativity as a static event, the curves make visible the ongoing movement between exploration, coordination, novelty generation, stabilization, and shared understanding.
The curves do not measure creativity itself. Instead, they visualize patterns of interaction that are associated with creative activity.
By representing interaction as a dynamic trajectory, Sense-Making Curves help researchers, designers, educators, and practitioners understand how participants navigate uncertainty, discover new possibilities, and construct meaning together.
Creative processes consist of evolving interactions rather than isolated moments of insight.
The curves provide a way to observe patterns that would otherwise remain hidden within large interaction datasets.
Human-human and human-AI collaboration can be analyzed through interaction trajectories.
The curves reveal how participants move between divergent exploration and convergent coordination.
Learn the theoretical foundations of the framework and how interaction dynamics become visual trajectories.
Understand how to interpret peaks, valleys, transitions, oscillations, and long-term trends.
Explore the distinction between exploratory and coordinative interaction dynamics.
View Sense-Making Curves generated from drawing studies, collaborative creativity experiments, and human-AI co-creation systems.
Sense-Making Curves represent one of the central contributions of the Creative Sense-Making framework. They provide a bridge between theory and measurement, allowing interaction dynamics to be visualized, analyzed, and compared across diverse creative contexts.
By transforming interaction into trajectories, the framework offers a new way to understand how creativity emerges through participation.