The value of computers is not inherent; it is what we are able to do with them that makes them valuable. But what we can do with computers is often limited by the depth to which we are able to think creatively, translate these thoughts into computationally articulated work, and then share that work with others. For this reason, digital tools that foster creativity and collaboration hold immeasurable power. So how can we push digital creative tools to their full potential as co-creators, thus harnessing the full power of creative thought and computational actualization to enable human innovation?

How can we push digital creative tools to their full potential as co-creators, thus harnessing the full power of creative thought and computational actualization to enable human innovation?

Ultimately, I will be arguing that to foster optimal human innovation, digital creative tools need to be interoperable, moldable, efficient, and community-driven. 

Print-formatted PDF ↗

Early creative tools

Beginning with the early days of the workplace computer in the 1950s, computers began as purely logical room-sized execution machines that operated on paper and punch cards. A human would feed the computer tasks in the precise way the computer understood, and the computer would perform a desired function for the operator. Usually, those functions were basic mathematical operations. This was revolutionary for its time and embodied a task-based relationship between human and machine that continues to define how we operate computers today.

Oscillon 40 by Ben Laposky — one of the first recorded pieces of art created with a computer. Laposky used an oscilloscope to manipulate and photograph electronic waves displayed on a fluorescent screen.

However, a new way of thinking about these machines began to emerge in the late 1980s. From the punch card came the spreadsheet, which eliminated the need to provide physical inputs and allowed us to utilize math in a new way. Meanwhile, creative applications for computers began to emerge. As the Victoria and Albert Museum present in A History of Computer Art, “In the 1950s, many artists and designers were working with mechanical devices and analogue computers in a way that can be seen as a precursor to the work of the early digital pioneers who followed. One of the earliest electronic works in the V&A's collection is Oscillon 40 dating from 1952. The artist, Ben Laposky, used an oscilloscope to manipulate electronic waves that appeared on the small fluorescent screen.” Throughout the history of digital tools, a common theme is the technological advancement spurred by artists pushing the limits of the existing tools and creating their own adjacent tools to better serve their needs. 

Douglas Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" introduced numerous computing paradigms that have since become ubiquitous, such as the mouse and the graphical interface.

Historically, the primary strains of creative tools have been text editors, spreadsheets, HyperText,¹ and Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. For the purposes of this essay, “digital creative tool” will refer to tools that foster creative thought in their human users, whether that be a design, writing, or multimedia tool. With the introduction of Superpaint,² one of the first image editing programs in 1984, the concept of the digital creative tool began to take its initial form—pioneering conventions that are still in use today such as the digital canvas and the tooling menu. However, it is worth reconsidering aspects of these historical conventions in the interest of fostering greater human creativity using digital tools.

1  The original Superpaint editor tool menu.
2  An illustration of Dynabook, Alan Kay’s "personal computer for children of all ages."
3  A visual representation of J.C.R. Licklider's Intergalactic Computer Network.

¹ Hypertext was first coined by Ted Nelson and refers to text that links to other texts.
‍
² Superpaint was created by Xerox PARC employee Richard Shoup, among others.

The genesis of many original creative tools were inspired by the work of thinkers such as Douglas Engelbart, who published a vision of tools empowering humans in his pioneering 1962 paper Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. As could be surmised, his goal was to use digital tools to augment human intelligence and thus boost our collective intellect. Engelbart’s work, along with many other designers and programmers such as Ivan Sutherland (Sketchpad³), J.C.R. Licklider (Intergalactic Computer Network⁴) and Alan Kay (Dynabook⁵ and OOP⁶) clarified a new approach in which computers weren’t merely executors, but “joyful” machines that could expand human thought itself (Engelbart). As Engelbart put it, “tools… will serve as new media of expression and inspiration to creativity.” Engelbart was not alone in this thinking and inspired other computer scientists like Alan Kay to study how computers could amplify imagination. While these early manifestations of creative tools unlocked pioneering ideas on the relationship between humans and machines, they were largely conceptual in nature. Engelbart and Kay’s work hinted at a future of creative tools built to serve the human mind’s creativity, but were missing the financial support from technology companies to invest further in the relationship between humans and machines as opposed to investing primarily in machines themselves.

³  Sketchpad was the first CAD program to have a complete graphical user interface.

⁴ The Intergalactic Computer Network was a computer networking concept similar to today's Internet that was imagined by J.C.R. Licklider as an “electronic commons open to all.”

⁵ Dynabook was Alan Kay’s vision of a portable educational device similar to a laptop or tablet, but with near eternal battery life.

⁶ Object-oriented programming, or OOP, is a programming paradigm pioneered by Alan Kay using the concept of "objects" containing data and code.

More broadly, the role of collaboration in digital creative tools has been complex and multifaceted. The shift to computing in a network has redefined how we think about collaboration using digital tools. Beginning with the birth of the internet with the help of those such as Ted Nelson,¹¹ we quickly moved on to a period of mobile technology proliferation. Collaborative software as we know it was born soon after in the form of Google Sheets, the first simultaneous multiplayer software. The state of collaborative software today is a testament to the progression of tools for creativity, as well as the room we still have left to help them reach their full potential.

Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) is an opinionated two-front-cover book by Ted Nelson on the promises and perils of the foretold computer revolution.

The origins of digital creative tools show that the most boundary-pushing and high-potential tools were often interoperable, moldable, community-driven, abstracted, and efficient, thus actualizing creativity within the tool itself. Upon review, it is clear that the fundamental human-computer interaction principles of the past have remained unchanged, such as the direct manipulation of graphical objects, the mouse, and windows. However, it is also evident that our expectations for a computer’s capacity to understand and serve us has expanded considerably (Brad Myers, A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology). We will now examine this gap between our historical-ideals-driven expectations and the contemporary reality of digital creative tools.

Creative tools today

Today, computers have become a melded version of both a task-based execution machine (calculations, programming) and an intelligent creative co-creator (writing and design tools). As João Miguel Cunha states in Generation of Concept-Representative Symbols, we are in the process of “shift[ing] away from using computers as tools and see[ing] them [instead] as partners, as well as mak[ing] computational co-creativity applications available to the general public.” However, in recent decades, this shift has been slow and undefined, only noticeable to the computer-using public in new consumer softwares boasting mainly efficiency upgrades.

Elements on a design tool canvas, ad infinitum.

So if this shift to co-creation is happening (albeit slowly), where exactly is it taking place and who is leading the charge? Despite their brief moment in the internet limelight, creative computing communities have failed to maintain power over the software they operate. A close examination of the digital creative tools landscape today reveals that most innovation in this space has shifted away from the computer users (as seen through Actionscript and Flash) to instead by owned by the heavily funded R&D departments of the dominant Silicon Valley technology companies. As Alexis Madrigal states in Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World, “Quantitative research suggests that big companies do different kinds of R&D than their more modest counterparts. Instead of coming up with new products, they come up with process improvements. ‘If the nature of innovation is distorted toward selling to an incumbent, you’re going to get more feature-driven innovation rather than systemic disruption.’” This statement is directly reflected in digital creative tools' lack of concept-level innovation in the past ten years. We see this further exemplified through tools looking and operating very similarly to how they did at their founding.

However, it is worth noting the significant advancements that have been made within the existing creative tooling structures. Integrating collaboration features into creative tools has been a major development in the past decade and initiated the creation of new spaces for cross-functional creative work. In part as a result, digital real-time collaboration applications such as Figma have seen great success. The increasing prevalence of these collaborative creative tools also means that functional interoperability between them has become increasingly relevant to the work that we are all doing. Today’s projects need to accommodate a multitude of different media types within cross-functional spaces, yet editing each piece is still largely constrained to whichever tool it was created in. This reality pinpoints an opportunity for both interoperability and further innovation in the collaboration-between-tools space.

¹¹ Ted Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965. Nelson also introduced the term intertwingularity.

This business-driven innovation fails to invest in the creativity of human beings themselves, instead streamlining our ability to act as an execution machine.

The lack of concept development in digital creative tools poses another question: where have the technology industry’s resources been funneled? A mere cursory look at technology news reveals the industry’s heightened focus on artificial intelligence (AI)-fueled digital products. As Frederick Brooks explains in The Computer Scientist as Toolsmith II, “A tremendous national investment has been made, over the course of more than three decades. Indeed, a large amount of this country’s public investment in computer science research has gone into AI, compared with other promising opportunities. More serious even than the diversion of dollars was the diversion of the very best computer science minds of a generation, and much of the efforts of the very best academic laboratories.”

While the opportunity AI promises is immense, the benefits of its innovation fail to articulate how they might be widespread enough to have a significant positive impact on human needs or creativity, in the case of our line of inquiry. Instead, these innovations seem to be solely in service of corporations. AI offers businesses the ability to make a single investment in a machine, as opposed to paying human workers indefinitely. For example, Alana Semuels of Time Magazine states in Millions of Americans Have Lost Jobs in the Pandemic—And Robots and AI Are Replacing Them Faster Than Ever, “Now, as automation lets companies do more with fewer people, successful companies don’t need as many workers.” This business-driven innovation fails to invest in the creativity of human beings themselves, instead seeking to streamline our capability to act as an execution machine. Directionally, this thinking is clearly in contradiction with the ideas of early digital creative tool pioneers such as Engelbart and Kay. Furthermore, this reality proves the need for us to reconsider our priorities for progress if we truly wish to foster greater human innovation.

Despite the technology industry’s widespread investment in recreating human intelligence, the computer’s capacity to be creative is still entirely dependent upon the human’s ability to program that prescriptive creativity step-by-step into a machine. As Tony McCaffrey of There Will Always Be Limits to How Creative a Computer Can Be states, “The fastest modern supercomputer couldn’t list or explore all the features of an object/thing even if it had started working on the problem way back in the 1950s. When considering the Obscure Features Hypothesis for Innovation,¹² which states that every innovative solution is built upon at least one new or commonly overlooked feature of a problem, you can see how AI may never advance enough to take the jobs of Chief Innovation Officers.” While there are situations in which computers are able to figure out the steps needed to get from state A to state B, it is still within the limitations of pre-human-mandated decomposition. This means that the actions we take with computers are steps that we have already broken down in our head in order to achieve an end result. This is often a highly repetitive process, and makes clear that there is room for computers to become better co-creators in order to make space for human creativity. 

¹² The Obscure Features Hypothesis (OFH) states that all innovative solutions are built upon at least one overlooked feature of the problem at hand.

Acknowledging that computers themselves are not inherently creative should not come as a surprise. Instead, this truth identifies an opportunity for computers to more fully assume the role of co-creator — not idea-generator, but actualizer.

Acknowledging that computers themselves are not inherently creative should not come as a surprise. Instead, this truth identifies an opportunity for computers to more fully assume the role of co-creator — not idea-generator, but actualizer. Furthermore, it is worth acknowledging that human creativity and innovation is not a solitary sport. In fact, most great digital innovations are the product of a commitment to collaboration and the melding of many different perspectives. 

Facilitating collaboration in a digital tool is a key multiplier for creativity. When you bring people together to create in the same space (whether it be digital or physical), they are able to learn from and build upon each other's work through the process of collaborative knowledge creation. This reality again highlights the pertinence of functional interoperability since the cross-pollination of digital work between different tools is necessary for collaboration to function as smoothly as possible. Fostering both creativity and collaboration in a co-creation tool harnesses the power of computation and the potential of multiple human perspectives. 

An ad for the original Apple Macintosh using Jobs' "bicycle for the mind" analogy.

As Steve Jobs once explained during an interview in Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress, “that’s what a computer is to me… it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” This framing steers our attention away from automating digital tools to become creators themselves. Instead, we can reconfigure our goal towards aiming to construct software intelligent enough to figure out the steps needed to produce a desired outcome in service of the human or group's broader creative vision. As Shan Carter and Michael Nielsen explain succinctly in Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence, “Intelligence Augmentation (IA), is all about empowering humans with tools that make them more capable and more intelligent, while Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been about removing humans fully from the loop.” Using this perspective, my argument will propose several ways that we can refocus on Engelbart, Carter, Nielsen, and Job’s shared vision of augmenting human intelligence using digital creative tools.