Visual divergence in humans and computers

Studies of design creativity have underlined the importance of divergent reasoning and visual reasoning in idea generation. Connecting these two key design skills, this paper presents a model of divergent visual reasoning for the study of creativity. A visual divergence task called ShapeStorm is demonstrated for the study of creative ideation that can be applied to humans as well as computational systems. The model is examined in a study with human subjects, a computational stochastic generator, and a geometrical analysis of the solution space. The main significance of this task is that it offers a straightforward means to define a simple design task that can be used across research studies. Several scenarios for the application of ShapeStorm for the study of creativity are advanced.