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Welcome to the Creative Systems Lab in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. We perform fundamental research on designing and building creative systems, and use them to study creative cognition. The laboratory is directed by an open collective of student designers, researchers, and technologists, with the guidance of Assistant Professor of the Practice Haakon Faste.

Creativity is central to innovations in human-computer interaction, and distinguishes design practice from more technical approaches. We believe that more efficient creative processes can be designed, but that doing so effectively involves overcoming two challenging problems. The first is how to enable individuals to have the skills of integrity and self-leadership necessary for sustained creative behavior, and the second is how to manage and encourage such design activity in organizations and teams. Human-computer interface technology promises to enhance creativity for both individuals and collaborating groups. Our aim is to design and use creative systems to understand how.

There are three primary ways you can get involved: (1) sign up for a user account as a "lab cat" and come to small group brainstorms and critiques (or contribute online) for at least 1 hour/week, (2) join an existing project as a “minidependent study” (or more time intensive study) for credit, or (3) lead your own creative research project as a fully fledged “interdependent study” with the lab. For more information, click here to send us an email.

New to the lab? Check out the Creative Systems Laboratory Design project page, and brush up on your reading... especially our previous publications and pending research grant proposals.