Empirically Studying Participatory Sense-Making in Abstract Drawing with a Co-Creative Cognitive Agent

This paper reports on the design and evaluation of a co-creative drawing partner called the Drawing Apprentice, which was designed to improvise and collaborate on abstract sketches with users in real time. The system qualifies as a new genre of creative technologies termed "casual creators" that are meant to creatively engage users and provide enjoyable creative experiences rather than necessarily helping users make a higher quality creative product. We introduce the conceptual framework of participatory sense-making and describe how it can help model and understand open-ended collaboration. We report the results of a user study comparing human-human collaboration to human-computer collaboration using the Drawing Apprentice system. Based on insights from the user study, we present a set of design recommendations for co-creative agents.