Sparking Creativity with Robots: A Design Perspective

Abstract

We present the design and evaluation process of a robot aimed at stimulating creativity in humans in a collaborative drawing-oriented task. Collaboration towards a common goal is known to be one of the most influential factors for creativity nourishing. The social robot acted as a collaborative peer in a drawing activity, taking turns with the human, to complete their drawing. In each turn, both "artists" (the robot and the human) draw something new until they achieved their final drawing. The goal was to study if a robot, in comparison with a tablet, can stimulate creativity. A total of 28 participants were distributed across robot and tablet conditions. Creativity scores for each drawing were calculated. Contrary to what was expected, the creativity score did not present a statistically significant main effect across conditions. We discuss our results under a design perspective, addressing the role of the robot’s embodiment and presence, as well as the purpose of use for robots in society and what implications there is for design.

Social Robots as Creativity Eliciting Agents

“…Finally, while this work evaluates the role of the robot’s creativity fostering behaviors, it does not evaluate the benefits of embodiment over other non-embodied agents such as computers or voice agents. Previous research has found that adults did not show significant gains in creativity merely in the presence of a social robot ( Alves-Oliveira et al, 2019 ). In future work, we aim to study the combined effect of embodiment and creativity scaffolding behaviors by running a 2 × 2 study ({embodied, non-embodied}×{scaffolding, non-scaffolding}) ( Devasia et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Previous work has demonstrated how social robots can influence children’s learning behaviors such as curiosity, growth mindset, and empathy through social emulation ( Gordon et al, 2015 ; Park et al, 2017 ). Notably, the presence of a social robot can also affect adults’ creativity ( Kahn et al, 2016 ; Alves-Oliveira et al, 2019 ). In this work, we explore how social robots can foster creativity in young children through collaborative, playful interactions.…”

“…Despite creativity’s social nature, little work has been conducted on the benefit of utilizing social agents as CSTs. Previous work has demonstrated how verbal and non-verbal social robot behavior can serve to engage adults in a creative activity for longer and aid their own creative ideas ( Kahn et al, 2016 ; Alves-Oliveira et al, 2019 ), and children will emulate a social robot’s expressed verbal and figural creativity, resulting in a higher level of creative expression ( Ali et al, 2019 ; Ali et al, 2020 ). Alves-Oliveira et al (2020) demonstrated how interacting with the robotic system YOLO when it displayed social and creative behaviors simulated children’s creative abilities.…”

“…Similar to Ali et al (2019 ) and ( Ali et al, 2021 ), we utilize the robot’s creativity demonstration as a creativity eliciting mechanism. Similar to Alves-Oliveira et al (2019) and Kahn et al (2016) , we made use of the robot’s social verbal and non-verbal interactions during child-robot interaction. Through the three game interaction, and the robot assuming different social behaviors, we studied how creativity demonstration and creativity scaffolding through social interactions benefited children’s creative expression.…”

Exploring Behavioral Creativity of a Proactive Robot

“…The majority of the examples we saw in robotics use interaction patterns to support users' creativity. Robots adopt the role of either a supportive agent that facilitates the user's creativity (Elgarf et al, 2021;Alves-Oliveira et al, 2019) or a creative peer that is collaborating with the user on a creative task (Law et al, 2019;Lin et al, 2020;Hu et al, 2021). In that sense, all of the examples put creative thinking of the user as an aim of the robot.…”