Mapping the Landscape of Creativity Support Tools in HCI

TLDR

Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) are central to HCI creativity research, yet no consensus definition exists and they are often one‑off prototypes, making it hard to demarcate and compare studies and thus hindering progress in digital creativity. The authors aim to provide the first comprehensive overview of CST characteristics and propose a tentative definition to enhance knowledge sharing across HCI studies. They conducted a literature review of 143 ACM Digital Library papers (1999‑2018) to identify key CST features and formulate the definition. The study highlights that the lack of a clear definition impedes research demarcation and comparison, and discusses implications for future HCI research on CSTs and digital creativity.

Abstract

Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) play a fundamental role in the study of creativity in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Even so, there is no consensus definition of the term ‘CST’ in HCI, and in most studies, CSTs have been construed as one- off exploratory prototypes, typically built by the researchers themselves. This makes it difficult to clearly demarcate CST research, but also to compare findings across studies, which impedes advancement in digital creativity as a growing field of research. Based on a literature review of 143 papers from the ACM Digital Library (1999-2018), we contribute a first overview of the key characteristics of CSTs developed by the HCI community. Moreover, we propose a tentative definition of a CST to help strengthen knowledge sharing across CST studies. We end by discussing our study’s implications for future HCI research on CSTs and digital creativity.