Creative Search Trajectories and their Implications

Creative search trajectories are chronologically organized intermediate products (such as sketches and drafts) from the creative process. We discuss what sorts of conclusions can be made when these trajectories show non-monotonic progress toward the final creation. We introduce several key distinctions that are often overlooked, and argue that two null hypothesis processes must be rejected before non-monotonicity can be claimed to support more complex processes. We show that these null hypotheses are in fact difficult to rule out definitively using the sorts of evidence that past research