A computational model of collaborative creativity: a meta-design approach

The role of collaboration in the realm of social creativity has been the focus of cutting edge research in design studies. In this paper, the authors investigate the role of collaboration in the process of creative design and propose a computational model of creativity based on the newly proposed meta-design approach. Meta-design is a unique participatory approach to design that deals with opening up of design solution spaces, and is aimed at creating a viable social platform for collaborative design. A meta-design-based collaborative approach to the design process may achieve ET-creativity by expanding the conceptual space of design beyond what would have been possible by individual, non-collaborative design. The model has been implemented using interactive genetic algorithms, which casts the design problem as an optimization problem and uses a set of collaborative users for subjective fitness evaluation. The design problems investigated include the collaborative design of architectural floorplans and editorial design of brochures.