This paper examines prevailing understandings of creativity within creative computing research through the lens of feminist epistemology. We analyze creativity support as a construct that encodes different definitions of creative work. Drawing on existing literature and practices, the paper surfaces four views about creative work that underpin current creative technologies and HCI research: problem-solving, cognitive emergence, embodied action, and tool-mediate expert activity. Each view makes different claims about the role of computing in creative work and the creative subject assumed. We articulate the attendant politics of each view and illustrate how critical feminist epistemology can serve as an analytical tool to reason about the trade-offs of various creativity definitions. The paper concludes with suggestions on integrating feminist values into creativity-oriented HCI research.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642854
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