Motivation
The De Montfort Creativity Assistant is a tool designed to help develop creative ideas in a transdisciplinary multimedia context, based upon the thesis that "creativity is an emergent property". The intention is to first understand the stages that creative people move through in their journeys of exploration, discovery, innovation, and composition. The well-established path from preparation to incubation to illumination and verification is a good starting point, but more elaborate models are needed to guide software design for individual and social creativity support, and to deal with the controversial question of how such creativity support tools can be evaluated.
- De Montfort Creativity Assistant
- De Montfort Creative Environment
- De Montfort Creativity Mapper
- Collaborative Editor
- Instant Messaging
- Collaborative Whiteboard
- Reminder Functionality
Unlike Google Docs it provides several tools in one environment.
This project has the aim of solving the question if and how creativity can be mapped and analysed. Defining a model for the storage of data and later analysis is the first step in solving the problem. A generalised transition system is the ideal choice to cater for both tasks - storage and analysis. Being formally sound, our approach is providing a unifying framework to explore the human creativity.
Creativity Map
The figure depicts the creative behaviour of an artist stored in a creativity map. The map is a generalised transition system where states contain data about a stage of the project and transitions identify the action which lead to a stage. The types of action in this map are D: Discussion, I: Inspection, A: Aquiring, P: Prototyping, Te: Testing, De: Development, Ins: Inspiration and Ti: Time.
The types are grouped in categories (viewpoints). This enables the analysis for specific viewpoints. One might just be interested in the analysis of the viewpoint Creation and the effects to the Development during the creation. The categories in the example above are Need: (D; I; A), Creation: (P; Te), Invention: (De, Ins) and Time: (Ti). Categories in a creativity map are colour-coded.
A creativity map is ideal for identifying patterns of creative behaviour. One of the research topics of this project is the identification and analysis of those behavioural patterns. Slides of a recent presentation are available at: Behavioural Patterns
A detailed introduction about mapping human creativity can be found at the following link: Mapping Human Creativity
You can help us collection initial data for the analysation process. The De Montfort Creativity Mapper provides a non-intrusive GUI for collecting this data. Please find the software under the link below.
CreativityMapper
The slides of Keno's presentation at the IOCT Pecha Kucha Night are now available:
Slides
The Creative Environment now includes a new facility to show your creativity map on the fly. You can have a look at it by opening a file with the editor and click on "Show Creativity Map" in the "Creativity Mapper" menu entry.
The self-describing buttons and a intuitive handling make it an easy to use facility. It is possible to zoom into the branches of the map and change the layout to explore the map. The transition labels can be made visible or kept hidden when necessary. The user can change the appearance of the map by choosing one of the map layouts or can move nodes with the mouse.
Slides of the STRL Seminar on the 12/03/2009 - Mining for Behavioural Knowledge in Creative Processes:
Slides
Initial version of the De Montfort Creativity Mapper published:
CreativityMapper
Slides of the STRL Seminar on the 05/02/2009 - Using Behavioural Patterns:
Slides
Involved parties
