Trajectories of the Creative Process: A Multiple-Drafts Analysis of Graphic Design
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most experimental analyses of creativity look at one-shot production tasks. However, real-world creativity occurs over long periods of time and involves extensive exploration and revision. We carried out a week-long study in which graphic design students created an advertisement for a fictional business, submitting daily drafts of their evolving ad. By analyzing the successive changes to these ads across the 7 daily drafts, we sought to characterize the trajectory of the creative process for each designer. In doing so, we elaborated on the core concept of the Geneplore model (i.e. generation + exploration) by proposing a 2 × 2 predictive scheme of creative trajectories in which a) the generative phase specifies either a global plan of the final product or merely a kernel idea for it, and b) the exploratory phase proceeds in either a linear or nonlinear manner, thereby resulting in four basic trajectories. We analyzed the relative frequency of these trajectory-types in our 37 graphic design students using a novel “change analysis” method. In addition, we examined how the novelty, quality, and stylistic features of the final ad related to the trajectory-type of the creator. The results revealed that there are multiple routes toward achieving a comparable level of novelty in a creative product.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it