Quantifying the Artistic Experience with Perceptive Sketching Tools: Cognitive Technologies to Support Creativity Researchers

Creativity research has gradually moved away from controlled laboratory settings to more naturalistic and real world domains. As a result, new research methods are required to systematically analyze the artistic experience that includes the artist’s perception, behavior, and conception throughout the creative process. We use research findings from the Cognitive Science literature to create a framework called Perceptual Logic to categorize different types of artistic experience. This framework is applicable to open-ended artistic creativity. Empiri- cally validating such a framework requires new tools that provide insight into the naturalistic creative process. We describe the initial design of a set of digital sketching tools that enables creativity researchers to quantitatively analyze the artistic experience. These tools focus spe- cifically on understanding how visual digital artists perceive and interact with their drawings and paintings throughout their creative process.