Tracing Creativity: A Design Space For Creative Activity Traces in HCI

Paper Title

Tracing Creativity: A Design Space For Creative Activity Traces in HCI

Publication Info

• Topic area: Creative activity traces in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and their role in creativity tool design.
• Keywords: Creativity tools, activity traces, HCI, creative processes, design materials, generative AI, trace awareness, creative workflows, intermediate outputs, system design.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Creativity tools often fail to systematically capture, represent, and operationalize the process-related data (activity traces) generated during creative work. This results in tools that flatten creative processes into static snapshots, losing the temporal richness of iterative workflows.
• Significance: Addressing this gap is critical for designing tools that better align with creative practices, support reflection, reuse, and adaptation, and enable richer interactions between creators and systems.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work on Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) and related systems has focused on enabling creative outputs but has not systematically examined how process data is captured or utilized. The rise of generative AI amplifies the need for a framework to understand and leverage activity traces, as these systems increasingly rely on complex, multimodal process data.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The authors introduce the Living Framework for Trace Awareness, which characterizes the data and temporal features of activity traces and how they are utilized in creativity tools.
• Novelty:
  1. Development of the first systematic framework for analyzing and comparing activity trace usage across creativity tools.
  2. Identification of trace-aware systems that leverage temporal process data to shape system behavior.
  3. Analysis of 133 creativity tools to map trace usage across domains and identify gaps and opportunities.
  4. Proposal to treat activity traces as a "design material" for more intentional and creator-aligned tool design.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted a literature review of 133 papers from 2020–2025 across major HCI venues.
  • Developed a coding scheme to analyze trace data characteristics (modality, origin, context, channel) and trace-aware system behaviors (capture agency, context window, visibility, function).
  • Synthesized findings into the Living Framework for Trace Awareness, highlighting trace usage patterns and gaps.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • 57% of analyzed systems (77 out of 133) were trace-aware, leveraging temporal process data for system behavior.
  • Text emerged as the most frequent modality, often used as a lingua franca for representing traces across domains.
  • Functions of traces were categorized into retrospective (e.g., reflection, backtracking), manipulation (e.g., reuse, organization), and prospective (e.g., contextual suggestion, style alignment).
  • Domains like music/audio and video editing exhibited limited trace-aware functionality compared to creative coding or writing tools.
• Advantage over baselines: The framework provides a structured vocabulary to analyze and compare trace usage across systems, addressing the lack of a unified approach in prior work.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Literature review of 133 systems from HCI venues.
  • Coding of trace data characteristics and system behaviors.
  • Comparative analysis across 11 creative domains, including art, storytelling, video, and games.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Framework refinement is needed to address unresolved challenges, such as distinguishing between content and intent in trace data.
  • Limited scope to creative media domains; future work should extend to CAD, UX, and programming tools.
  • Ethical considerations around trace capture and usage require further exploration, including issues of consent, transparency, and normative ground.

Summary

This paper introduces the Living Framework for Trace Awareness to analyze and compare how creativity tools capture and utilize activity traces—process-related data generated during creative work. By reviewing 133 systems across creative domains, the authors identify patterns in trace usage, highlight gaps, and propose treating traces as a "design material" to align tools more closely with creative practices. The framework provides a foundation for designing trace-aware systems that support reflection, reuse, and adaptation, while addressing ethical and technical challenges. This work is a step toward more intentional and creator-aligned creativity tool design.