Creativity Mining: Humane Technology for Creating a Creative Society

This paper proposes a novel concept called "Creativity Mining" for making use of everybody's potential creativity. Even though it is quite difficult for general people to create novel things, that does not mean that we are not creative. We all potentially have creativity. We simply cannot manifest our potential creativity at will or are unaware of its existence. In this sense, we are not uncreative but not-yet-creative. To increase creative human resources to establish the coming "Creative Society" we require new technologies for finding the buried creativity deep within not-yet-creative people and for supporting its manifestation. Although creativity support technologies have been widely studied, they have supported the creative activities of already creative people. They are not useful for supporting not-yet-creative people. In contrast, creativity mining technology supports not-yet-creative people to find and confirm their potential creativity. We illustrate three example systems developed at the author's laboratory and discuss how they work as creativity mining systems and their requisites.