Casual creators

Many creativity tools exist to support task-focused creativity, but in recent years we have seen a flourishing of autotelic creativity tools, which privilege the enjoyable experience of explorative creativity over task-completion. Because these tools are much smaller in scope, less commercially significant, and less”serious” than their larger siblings, they have been overlooked in academic research. This paper coins the term”Casual Creators” for these tools, and provide a definition to identify tools that belong to this category. We also identify the particular design considerations that arise from autotelic creativity, and propose a number of strong design patterns that serve those considerations, patterns which are demonstrated by case studies of software built with those patterns. We believe that once this field is identified and named, the currently-isolated practitioners who make these casual creators will be able to share knowledge, like these design patterns, and develop a community of practice.