Can theories of mental imagery, conscious mental contents, developed within cognitive science throw light on the obscure (but culturally very significant) concept of imagination? Three extant views of mental imagery are considered: quasi-pictorial, description, and perceptual activity theories. The first two face serious theoretical and empirical difficulties. The third is (for historically contingent reasons) little known, theoretically underdeveloped, and empirically untried, but has real explanatory potential. It rejects the “traditional ” symbolic computational view of mental contents, but is compatible with recent situated cognition and active vision approaches in robotics. This theory is developed and elucidated. Three related key aspects of imagination (non-discursiveness, creativity, and seeing as) raise difficulties for the other theories. Perceptual activity theory presents imagery as non-discursive and relates it closely to seeing as. It is thus well placed to be the basis for a general theory of imagination and its role in creative thought.

Creative conceptual change involves (a) the construction of new concepts and of coherent belief systems, or theories, relating these concepts, and (b) the modification and extrapolation of existing concepts and theories in novel situations. We discuss these and other types of conceptual change, and present computational models of constructive and extrapolative processes in creative conceptual change. The models have been implemented as computer programs in two very different task domains, autonomous robotic navigation and fictional story understanding. Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Case studies in creative conceptual change 4 3 Constructive conceptual change 6 4 Technical details: The SINS system 9 4.1 Task: Autonomous robotic navigation : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 9 4.2 Representation: Continuous prototypical cases : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 13 4.3 Process: Concept construction and modification : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 17 4.4 Discussion: Construc...

Although creativity has largely been studied in problem solving contexts, creativity consists of both a generative component and a comprehension component. In particular, creativity is an essential part of reading and understanding of natural language stories. We have formalized the understanding process and have developed an algorithm capable of producing creative understanding behavior. We have also created a novel knowledge organization scheme to assist the process. Our model of creativity is implemented as a portion of the ISAAC (Integrated Story Analysis And Creativity) reading system, a system which models the creative reading of science fiction stories. Introduction Creativity remains a largely unexplained facet of human intelligence; neither psychologists nor artificial intelligence researchers have produced complete theories of it. While most creativity researchers have investigated the behavior in a problem solving context, we are more interested in how creativity is manifes...

Reading is an area of human cognition which has been studied for decades by psychologists, education researchers, and artificial intelligence researchers. Yet, there still does not exist a theory which accurately describes the complete process. We believe that these past attempts fell short due to an incomplete understanding of the overall task of reading; namely, the complete set of mental tasks a reasoner must perform to read and the mechanisms that carry out these tasks. We present a functional theory of the reading process and argue that it represents a coverage of the task. The theory combines experimental results from psychology, artificial intelligence, education, and linguistics, along with the insights we have gained from our own research. This greater understanding of the mental tasks necessary for reading will enable new natural language understanding systems to be more flexible and more capable than earlier ones. Furthermore, we argue that creativity is a necessary componen...

. An important aspect of creative design is the concept of emergence. Though emergence is important, its mechanism is either not well understood or it is limited to the domain of shapes. This deficiency can be compensated by considering definitions of emergent behaviour from the Artificial Life (ALife) research community. With these new insights, it is proposed that a computational technique, called evolving representations of design genes, can be extended to emergent behaviour. We demonstrate emergent behaviour in a co-evolutionary model of design. This co-evolutionary approach to design allows a solution space (structure space) to evolve in response to a problem space (behaviour space). Since the behaviour space is now an active participant, behaviour may emerge with new structures at the end of the design process. This paper hypothesizes that emergent behaviour can be identified using the same technique. The floor plan example of (Gero & Schnier 1995) is extended to demonstrate how...

Dedicated to the open minds of students and practitioners everywhere. iii Browsing is an open-ended activity, which involves fulfillment of vague desires, as well as satisfaction of definite goals. Typical computational artifacts, on the other hand, address well-formed problems. Even in the field of human computer interaction, development processes have previously been modeled in terms of users ’ concrete tasks. Undertaking more open inquiries necessitates exploring more open processes and methods. The interactive artifact, CollageMachine, which addresses browsing creatively, has been co-developed with the metadisciplinary framework of interface ecology. CollageMachine is a creative web visualization tool that learns while

genetic algorithms

Creative design in safety critical systems is a quite unexplored area of research. Historically, the design of tools, technologies and procedures in such domains has been advocated to engineers and human factors experts who interpreted the development of new concepts mainly as a problem solving activity. For example, one of the most popular methods for technological innovation, TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) (Altshuller,1994) is a technology oriented collection of “principles of invention ” applied to a three steps process: problem definition, problem analysis and solution generation. The development of innovative outcomes in this kind of approaches is regarded as an activity of searching for alternative solutions within the constraints of the problem analysis. The present paper proposes a different approach to creative design in safety critical systems. It is based on the idea that original and innovative outcomes are not accidental but can be generated as the product of a collaborative social process of co-construction of knowledge and meaning negotiation. The paper illustrates this position by discussing theories of creativity and presenting a case study.

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Figure 1: 3D models created using data-driven suggestions, starting from simple shapes for which suggestions were generated. We introduce data-driven suggestions for 3D modeling. Datadriven suggestions support open-ended stages in the 3D modeling process, when the appearance of the desired model is ill-defined and the artist can benefit from customized examples that stimulate creativity. Our approach computes and presents components that can be added to the artist’s current shape. We describe shape retrieval and shape correspondence techniques that support the generation of data-driven suggestions, and report preliminary experiments with a tool for creative prototyping of 3D models.