Human Creativity Can be Facilitated Through Interacting With a Social Robot

Is it possible to design robots of the future so that they can enhance people's creative endeavors? Forty-eight young adults were asked to produce their most creative ideas in a small Zen rock garden in a laboratory setting. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In one condition, the robot Robovie (through a Wizard of Oz interface) encouraged participants to generate creative ideas (e.g., "Can you think of another way to do that?"), and pulled relevant images and video clip from the web for each participant to look at which could help spur the participant into more creative expressions. In a second condition, participants engaged in the same Zen rock garden task with the same core information, but through the modality of a self-paced PowerPoint presentation. Results showed that participants engaged in the creativity task longer and provided almost twice the number of creative expressions in the robot condition compared to the PowerPoint condition. Discussion focuses on a vision of social robotics coupled with advances in natural language processing to enhance the human creative mind and spirit.