Dr. Celine Latulipe Reading

Title: The Creativity Support Index
Reference Information:
The Creativity Support Index
Carroll, Erin. Latulipe, Celine.
CHI 2009, April 4 – 9, 2009, Boston, MA, USA


Summary: In Latulipe's article, The Creativity Support Index, she discusses the difficulties behind quantifying creativity. Since creativity itself is hard to define, creativity tools are equally as hard to create, due to a lack of data.

Historically, scientists have either chosen to use a custom, context specific index, or they have used the NASA Task Load Index Survey. The NASA survey however is very open ended and general, so it does not often apply to creative works.

The Creative Support Index that Latulipe and Carroll have designed is specifically created to quantify creative works. It works on a +/- 10 point scale in the areas of Exploration, Collaboration, Engagement, Effort/Reward Tradeoff, Tool Transparency, and Expressiveness.

Discussion: Latulipe's Creativity Support Index was very interesting to read about. It seems like a significant improvement over the NASA standard, and an excellent addition to the field.

The concept of quantifying creativity seems interesting to me. By definition, everyone's standard of creativity is subjective, so it seems that the scale would vary drastically by personal taste.