Discussion

The common thread linking all of these past approaches to creativity is that they are all primarily, in one way or another, creative design systems. While many of them do contain elements of   creative understanding, that is not their focus. In fact, there is little work on the topic of creative understanding, per se. Some may argue that areas such as analogy, problem interpretation, metaphor, novel language use, explanation-based learning, and conceptual clustering all embody the essence of what I am choosing to call creative understanding. Am I, then, simply attaching a new label to existing ideas? I would argue ``no.'' Research in the above areas do all embody important aspects of the creative understanding problem. But, past research has not treated creative understanding as a unique area of inquiry as I do.