Creativity and Cognition 1999: Part I: Perspectives from the Third Symposium: Introduction

The Creativity and Cognition conference series was conceived in the early 1990s. At that time, there were few opportunities to bring scientists, technologists and artists together so that they might share perspectives on the nature of creativity. The first meeting was held in 1993 [1], the second in 1996 [2]. With the third meeting in 1999, the conference became an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI) event [3,4]. The fourth event will take place in October 2002.

At the opening session of the third Creativity and Cognition Conference (Loughborough University, U.K., 10-13 October 1999), the chair, Ernest Edmonds, noted how in creativity research since the 1980s there had been a strong shift away from old conceptions of artificial intelligence (AI). Previously, researchers had envisaged a future world of intelligent machines that might one day match or even eclipse the best of human creativity. The new AI, Edmonds asserted, was more focused on constructing machine agents to support human creativity [5]. Sitting in the audience listening to this claim were two pioneers of early AI; Marvin Minsky, author of The Society of Mind [6], and Harold Cohen, author of AARON, the world's first art-creating computer [7]. As if to prove this point, in their invited keynote addresses [8,9] both these past advocates of the potential of computers to challenge our assumptions about the uniqueness of human creativity confounded the audience's expectations. In contrasting ways, they turned the audience's attention towards the need to re-examine our expectations of what humans and machines are best at doing. For both, knowledge remains a key dimension of thinking and of the creative process. But this process does not end with knowledge, for without considering the fundamentals of perception, cognition, emotion and the way we learn to represent our world internally, both speakers argued, we can have only a partial understanding of the complex nature of the creative process.

The stimulating conjunction of ideas and interests represented at the 1999 conference is no better illustrated than by the range of invited speakers, including Marvin Minsky, Stelarc and Ben Shneiderman presenting the insights of, respectively, artificial intelligence, art practice and human-computer interaction.

New Perspectives in Creativity Research

The papers selected for this special section, and for a second installment scheduled to appear in June 2002, focus upon research at the intersection of art practice, creative cognition and the role of digital technology. The notion of "research" used here is broad, including the development of creative practice in relation to technology, cognitive science and human-computer interaction issues. Earlier versions of all of the papers were presented at the third Creativity and Cognition conference [10].

The Creativity and Cognition conference series encourages and promotes research that adopts this breadth of approach. In research into creativity, there is often an unquestioned assumption that the central activity to be described is a mental state. Many models of creativity focus primarily upon what happens inside the person's head, whereas activities such as handling tools, exchanging ideas in discussion and accessing and transforming domain knowledge are not often represented. There are a number of problems with this approach, not least of which is that it gives us a very partial view of the creative process. It does not, for example, help us understand how knowledge of the world, including the tools and devices we use, can affect the way that creativity develops. And if we do not understand that, how can we take the steps appropriate to change the environment for enhancing creative practice? To achieve this, we must research creative acts from the complex perspective of considering the whole rather than the parts. We need to understand more than subject-specific answers: we also need to understand the interactions between the different attributes of creative practice: for example, consideration of the specific implications of using a computer as distinct from (say) a drill. This can inform our understanding of the larger issues concerning how the tools we use affect creative practice. Without more answers to these kinds...