Notification: The Neurodesign Group is currently operating at a reduced capacity following Dr. Julia von Thienen's transition to new professional roles in 2024. Despite this, the team remains actively engaged, continuing research on a voluntary basis. Our email address remains unchanged. We invite you to stay connected: Reach out, share ideas, follow updates, and send proposals. We look forward to continuing the exploration of this fascinating domain together!

Explore Your Creativity with Innovative Tools

Immune Defense

Play. Discover. Measure.
Measure creativity without thinking about it – just play the video game Immune Defense where you protect an alien heart from viral invaders in a unique tower defense challenge. No gaming experience? Never mind. A quick tutorial gets you started, and resulting creativity scores are independent of gaming experience.

• Time Commitment: 5 minutes per test.
• How It Works: Place and upgrade defenses to protect your base.
• Your Results: Fill out the post-game form to request a detailed analysis.

➡️ Play Immune Defense Now

To learn more about the science behind Immune Defense, visit the project website.

CollaboUse

Collaborate. Create. Compete.
Generate creative ideas - alone or as a team - with the CollaboUse test. In just three minutes, combine everyday items and craft original solutions to a random challenge.

• Solo or Team Mode: Assess your individual creativity or collaborative team performance.
• Repeatability: Fresh prompts every time allow for repeated creativity testing.
• Your Results: Download your file and send it for evaluation.

➡️ Take the CollaboUse Test

To learn more about the science behind CollaboUse, visit the project website.

Schaeffer’s Charades

Visuals vs. Sounds: Which Sparks Your Creativity More?
Experiment with your creative strengths in Schaeffer’s Charades. Convey concepts like "wedding" or "lecture" by designing short movies using visuals or sounds.

• Compare Modes: Visuals or sounds? Find out where your creativity thrives. Improve by practice.
• Game-Like Assessment: Allow a human audience to guess your concepts.
• Cutting-Edge Tech: Results can be analysed automatically with C-Tracer.

➡️ Play Schaeffer’s Charades

To learn more about the science behind Schaeffer’s Charades, visit the project website.

C-Tracer

Quantify Creativity Like Never Before.
Based on the definition of creative performance, C-Tracer quantifies creativity by analyzing any digitally recorded behaviour. From gameplay to design sessions, it measures creativity, novelty, effectiveness, fluency, elaboration, and flexibility, providing instant and objective scores.

• Data-Driven Insights: Compare your results to others or track your own growth.
• Versatile Application: Works with natural behaviours and structured tasks.
• Free for Use: Upload your data files for a personalized analysis.

➡️ Try out C-Tracer

To learn more about the science behind C-Tracer, visit the project website.

Why Design Automated Creativity Tests?

Automated creativity tests have the potential to address key disadvantages of traditional creativity assessments:

1. Time-Intensive and Subjective Human Evaluations
   • Automated systems reduce the reliance on human judgment, making evaluations more efficient and scalable. For example, C-Tracer computes measures based on the definition of creative performance; it can automatically process data from tests such as Immune Defense, CollaboUse, and Schaeffer's Charades.
2. Unequal Opportunities Across Global Populations
   • Free internet-based tests, such as those listed above, broaden access and reduce biases caused by data predominantly coming from privileged cultural groups.
3. Reducing Score Manipulation
   • Automated tools focusing on objective behavioural data minimize the risks of biased self-reports and address lying issues that may arise in questionnaire-based assessments.
4. Team and Individual Assessments
   • Tools like CollaboUse evaluate both individual and team creativity, helping to reflect real-world problem-solving scenarios.
5. Dynamic Process Assessment
   • Automated approaches can capture creativity as an evolving phenomenon, assessing processes in addition to final outcomes; all tools referenced above demonstrate this capability.
6. Enhanced User Experience
   • Online tests offer convenience with remote access, replacing cumbersome, location-bound assessments. Short, game-like formats further improve usability, as seen in several tools mentioned above.
7. Support for Neuroscientific Integration
   • Click-focussed test designs (e.g., Immune Defense, Schaeffer’s Charades) can help to address EEG or fMRI requirements by minimizing movement artifacts often associated with motion-intensive test procedures, like those involving extensive drawing or writing.
8. Real-Life Relevance
   • Automated assessments can reduce the need for artificial testing scenarios by evaluating creativity in natural contexts. For example, C-Tracer measures creativity in any digitally recorded behaviour, such as analyzing datasets of emails written, drawings made, or games played by an individual, thus evaluating their everyday actions.
9. A Neurodesign Sweet Spot
   • By focusing on digital engineering, design thinking - creativity, and neuropsychology, the field brings together professional expertise and innovation potential to develop automated creativity tests for global benefits.

Interested? Contact us at:neurodesign(at)hpi.de

References

Borchart, K-P. (2023), Automatic and domain-agnostic creativity measurements on digital human traces, ECDTR. DOI:10.61044/ECDTR0124. Available online at: https://ecdtr.org/2023/12/17/automatic-and-domain-agnostic-creativity-measurements-on-digital-human-traces-10-61044-ecdtr0124/

Borchart, K.-P., von Thienen, J. P. A., & Meinel, C. (2021). C-Tracer: Automatic creativity measurement for any goal-directed behaviour that leaves digital traces. Full presentation at the MIC conference of creativity, Sept 8-10, Bologna, Italy.

Hilbrich, L. (2023). In search of a translation from light to sound: A visual-to-audio substitution approach [Master's thesis]. Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin.

Jaschek, C., Borchart, K., Krebs, E., Meinel, C., Kolodny, O. & von Thienen, J. P. A. (2020). Immune Defense. A video game to measure creativity. Full presentation at the MIC Conference of Creativity, Sept. 14-16, Bologna, Italy.

Jaschek, C, von Thienen, J. P. A., Borchart, K.-P. & Meinel, C. (2023). The CollaboUse Test for automated creativity measurement in individuals and teams: A construct validation study. Creativity Research Journal. Special Issue on Advancements in the Measurement and Evaluation of Creativity. Available online at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10400419.2022.2150813

Krebs, E., Jaschek, C., von Thienen, J. P. A., Borchart, K. P., Meinel, C., & Kolodny, O. (2020). Designing a video game to measure creativity. IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2020), full paper no. 148. Available online at: https://ieee-cog.org/2020/papers/paper_148.pdf

Maltenberger, T., Ilic, I., Weinstein, T., Ceh, S., & Benedek, M. (2021, September). Automated analysis of language creativity. MIC Conference of Creativity, Sept 8-10, Bologna, Italy.

Manaswini, M. (2023). From lab to life: Assessing physiological indicators of creativity and flow with wearable EEG technology in real-life settings [Master's thesis]. Hasso-Plattner-Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany.

Manaswini, M., McKee, H., Meinel, C., Arnrich, B. & von Thienen, J. P. A. (2023). From lab to life: Physiologically informed creativity research in naturalistic settings. Full presentation at the MIC Conference of Creativity, Sept 11-13, Trieste, Italy.

McKee, H. A. (2022). Detection of the flow mental state in the context of creative collaboration [Master's thesis]. Hasso-Plattner-Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany.

McKee, H., von Thienen, J. P. A., Rahman, S. & Meinel, C. (2021). Comparing different forms of automated creativity measurement in the study of individual and collaborative creative writing. Full presentation at the MIC Conference of Creativity, Sept 8-10, Bologna, Italy.

Steigerwald, P. (2024). Exploring the impact of action audio games on creativity: Perspectives in sonic thinking [Master's thesis]. Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin.

Steigerwald, P., Hilbrich, L., Strauch, T., Meinel, C., & von Thienen, J. P. A. (2024, September 15-18). Schaeffer's Charades: Measuring creative performance in the visual and auditory domain. MIC International Conference on Creativity 2024, Sardegna, Italy.

von Thienen, J. P. A. [organizer] (2020, Sept). Automation of creativity measurements. Symposium at the MIC Conference of Creativity, hosted online by the Marconi Institute, Bologna, Italy, Sept 14-16. With presentations by Corinna Jaschek, Kim-Pascal Borchart, Eva Krebs, Christoph Meinel, Oren Kolodny & Julia von Thienen; Yuval Hart; Hassan Sami Adnan, Samik Real & Shama Rahman; Mathias Benedek & Boris Forthmann.

von Thienen, J. P. A. [organizer] (2021, Sept). Automated creativity measurement. Symposium at the MIC Conference of Creativity, Bologna, Italy, Sept 8-10. With presentations by Tobias Maltenberger, Ivan Ilic, Theresa Weinstein, Simon Ceh, Mathias Benedek, Kim-Pascal Borchart, Julia von Thienen, Christoph Meinel, Holly McKee, Shama Rahman and Aleksi Halttunen.

Weinstein, T. J., Ceh, S. M., Meinel, C., & Benedek, M. (2022). What’s creative about sentences? A computational approach to assessing creativity in a sentence generation task. Creativity Research Journal. Special Issue on Advancements in the Measurement and Evaluation of Creativity,34(4), 419-430.