http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/eva2015.

Aesthetic Heuristics in Ubimus

Damián Keller Nuno Otero Leandro Costalonga

Amazon Centre for Music Research – Department of Media Technology Department of Computing and
NAP Linnaeus University Electronics
Federal University of Acre, Rio Branco 351 95 Växjö Federal University of Espírito Santo
Brazil Sweden Brazil
dkeller@ccrma.stanford.edu nuno.otero@lnu.se leandro.costalonga@ufes.br

In this paper we propose aesthetic heuristics as an area of study within ubiquitous music research.
Initially we discuss the motivations for narrowing the focus of the experimental variables involved
in creativity-centred design studies. Then we place aesthetic heuristics within the current efforts
toward designs for creativity support, highlighting recent studies that target everyday musical
creativity. The reviewed experimental results point to a gap between the current theoretical
proposals in musical creativity and the factors that impact everyday musical activities. Self-
referentiality of the experimental-theoretical construct and early domain restriction are two of the
limitations pointed out by previous theoretical work. We provide a working definition of aesthetic
heuristics, indicating its object of study and its rationale. We also lay out initial experimental
strategies. Potential contributions from interaction aesthetics and ubimus research are discussed,
introducing the concept of creative bias and a set of experimental hypotheses. The last section of
the paper furnishes examples of creative biases within the context of musical interaction design.

Ubiquitous music. Creativity-centred design. Aesthetic heuristics.

1. INTRODUCTION research has not yielded computer-based

Sellen et al. (2009) list five transformations that
impacted recent advances in Human-Computer
Interaction: 1. the end of interface stability, 2. the
growth of techno-dependency, 3. the growth of
hyper-connectivity, 4. the end of the ephemeral, 5.
the growth of creative engagement. This last
transformation implies that computer tools now can
be assembled and appropriated in ways that
change our worldviews. Whether we like it or not,
computational technology pervades our daily
activities, opening opportunities both for positive
and negative action (Rogers 2014). Becoming our
own producers, developers, publishers and critics
whether in routine or creative activities has
potentially far-reaching consequences. One of
these consequences is the ability to reshape our
daily experiences introducing aspects that
previously were relegated to highly trained
practitioners in specialized venues. Hence,
technologists have begun explicating the nature of
use as a question of experience and how it unfolds
over time, highlighting its subjective qualities
(Wright et al. 2008).
Although computers have been used within the
context of creative musical practices since the early
days of computer science, technology-based
creative music research still presents serious
methodological difficulties. On one hand, creativity
infrastructure to study musical phenomena in real-
world settings. On the other hand, computer
science research has generally targeted the
support of music production (e. g., sound synthesis,
real time control, graphic user interface design)
rather than the users' needs within the context of
creative activities (Eaglestone et al. 2008). Upton et
al.’s (2005) bleak assessments of the state of the
art still holds true: “There is currently a lack of a
research base for electroacoustic composition
systems. Studies have been mainly restricted to
‘traditional’ tonal Western Art Music. The search for
objective models of composition is also
exacerbated by sparsity of insightful research into
creativity, particularly from a software perspective.
Appropriate methodology is also problematic
because of the difficulty of determining the
cognitive processes of composers. Further,
derivation and validation of models requires
empirical studies, but these have rarely been used
to research composition. The experimental studies
that exist fail to address interaction with computer
systems, or to address complexities of professional
composition. Few go beyond trivial composition
exercises using crude and simple sound sources
(Upton et al. 2005).
One of the current multidisciplinary efforts to
investigate the creative potential of converging
forms of social interaction, mobile and distributed

64
 Aesthetic heuristics in ubimus
Damián Keller, Nuno Otero & Leandro Costalonga
technologies with materially grounded artistic
practices is ubiquitous music research (Keller et al.
2014a). The term ubiquitous music (ubimus)
encompasses practices that empower participants
of musical experiences through socially oriented,
creativity-enhancing tools (Keller et al. 2011a;
Miletto et al. 2011). Ubiquitous music has been
defined as a research field that deals with
distributed systems of human agents and material
resources that afford musical activities through
sustainable creativity support tools. One
perspective targets the development of
computational tools for supporting ubiquitous
musical activities by non-musicians (Flores et al.
2014; Miletto 2011), proposing design patterns and
metaphors for interaction to boost creativity.
Another approach focuses on the educational and
philosophical issues raised by ubimus practice,
highlighting the applicability of a dialogical proposal
grounded on the Brazilian educational movement
(Lima et al. 2012) and impacting the area of
participatory design (Keller et al. 2014a). A third
perspective proposes the fusion of creativity
studies with ubiquitous music practices, signalling a
path toward the application of experimental ubimus
research to increase our understanding of creative
phenomena in real-world settings (Keller et al.
2010, 2014a).
Taking as a point of departure recent theoretical
advances in Interaction Design and Human-
Computer Interaction (Löwgren 2009), Keller et al.
(2014a) discuss a body of knowledge relevant to
creativity support in the context of ubiquitous
musical activities. Among the concepts and
methods that have been proposed to describe
aspects of the ideation and materialization of
experiences with technology, pliability (Löwgren
2009) and anchoring (Keller et al. 2010) have
served as triggers for aesthetically aware design
initiatives, highlighting the affinity between
interaction aesthetics and ubimus (Keller et al.
2014a). Engagement, temporal patterns of
behaviour, alternative forms of design with
innovative material combinations and user
identities inserted in cultural contexts have been
identified as common themes. Creative potentials,
everyday creativity and distributed creativity
constitute emerging phenomena targeted by
ubiquitous music experimental research. Despite
the several parallels between the interaction
aesthetics and the ubimus research agendas,
targeting creativity implies dealing with phenomena
that have not been considered within the
aesthetics-oriented human-computer interaction
perspectives. Opportunities for innovative design
can be identified by observing creative practices
(design patterns), by applying cognitive models
(design actions) and by uncovering emergent
properties through experimental work (design
qualities). These three strategies can be combined
65
to implement creativity support metaphors,
targeting both domain-specific and general
creativity factors.
This paper introduces a new object of study within
ubimus research: aesthetic heuristics. The proposal
is closely aligned with recent advances in
interaction aesthetics (Keller et al. 2014b; Löwgren
2009), encompassing the knowledge gathered
through ubiquitous music experimental work (Keller
et al. 2011a; Lima et al. 2012) and taking
advantage of the theoretical tools developed in the
context of seventeen years of ecologically
grounded creative practice (Keller et al. 2014c).
Aesthetic heuristics concern creative-activity
decision making. In other words, the term aesthetic
heuristics focuses on the decision processes
involved in creative activities that target aesthetic
choices. Despite their narrowly oriented focus –
prominently dealing with creative decision making –
aesthetic heuristics cannot be detached from the
flow of ongoing creative activities and their
material, social and cognitive support. As objects of
study creative decisions are localized events that
take place while creative processes unfold. Hence,
most of the theoretical and methodological tools
that have been used in creativity-centred design
and in information technology creative practice can
be employed in the study of aesthetic heuristics.
The next section provides a working definition of
the proposal, indicating its object of study, its
rationale and the initial experimental strategies.
The third section discusses creative bias followed
by the potential contributions from interaction
aesthetics and ubimus research to aesthetic
heuristics. The necessity of creative bias is
discussed in section five. At sixth and final section
brings the potential creative biases and its
perspective of applications.
2. AESTHETIC HEURISTICS: CREATIVE
DECISION-MAKING AS AN OBJECT OF STUDY
A growing body of experimental evidence has been
gathered on outcomes based on irrational or biased
assessments of prospects. This is a key issue in
utilitarian decision-making because mismatches
between assessments and outcomes may lead to
miscalculations of the necessary resources ensuing
the application of suboptimal policies.
Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts that help to make
decisions under uncertain conditions (Kahneman &
Tversky 1979). The uncertainties may be
informational – when not enough knowledge is
available to make an informed decision – material –
when the available resources are not sufficient to
ground the decision-making process – or temporal
– when the decisions have to be made under time
pressure. Expanded notions of heuristics have also
 Aesthetic heuristics in ubimus
Damián Keller, Nuno Otero & Leandro Costalonga
been used in other fields, lifting the requirements of
making decisions under pressure and generalizing
the concept to “creative decision helpers.”
Amabile's (1996) distinction between formalized
thought and heuristic procedures traces a line
between computationally oriented perspectives on
creativity and decision-making in everyday
contexts. But recent research on computational
creative methods has incorporated unstructured
techniques to target activities that rely on resources
that become available during the creative act.
While computational intelligence relies on
knowledge representation and formalized
reasoning, idea processors usually set emphasis
on broader (unstructured) thinking. As Lubart
(2005: 369) suggested, “the key to designing truly
useful systems may be to clarify the nature of the
computer’s contribution for each proposed system,
how it fits with the nature of the creative thinking
task and to what extent the system provides what
the user[s] lack in order to be creative rather than
being redundant or contradictory with the users'
own ways of functioning.” This expanded notion of
creative heuristics tie the cognitive shortcuts used
in decision-making with the intent to produce a
creative output.
Amabile (1996) compiled a list of the most cited
heuristics for decision-making in the context of
creative activities. Rather than focusing on well-
defined procedures, five of the seven items
discussed by Amabile describe strategies to deal
with creative activity without predefined goals:
1. Play with ideas (Wickelgren 1979).
2. Try to generate hypotheses by analyzing case
studies, using analogies, accounting for exceptions
and investigating paradoxical incidents (McGuire
1997).
3. Make the familiar strange and the strange
familiar (Gordon 1961).
4. Try something counter-intuitive (Newell et al.
1958).
5. (a) Use concentrated work sessions rather than
scattered, distributed work sessions; (b) start by
playing with the same idea in a number of different
ways before entering the idea-generating sessions;
(c) do not rely on over-learning of response
algorithms (Mednick 1962).
6. (a) Try to rearrange the elements of a problem;
(b) take a break; (c) start to consider a solution
involving the most important elements before
elaborating the solution in detail; (d) try to consider
classes of elements on behalf of particular
elements; (e) given that the way to reach a goal
from your position seems too far, it may help to
look for shorter ways (Anderson 1980).
7. (a) Apply ‘‘intermediate impossibles”; (b)
determine the value of an idea by its potential to set
off further ideas rather than on is validity (de Bono
1971).
66
Items 2 and 6a, 6c, 6e call for explicit formulations
of specific epistemic targets as the first stage of the
creative activity. Thus, they can be classified as
problem-solving activities that can be tackled
through formalized procedures. The other
heuristics apply a diversified set of strategies to
deal with unknowns. Both exploratory (1, 5c, 6d) –
involving increasing the unstructured knowledge of
the available resources – and combinatorial-
analytical strategies (2, 6a, 6c, 6d) – focused on
structured knowledge of the resources – are
usually employed. In line with Stein's (1953)
proposal, some strategies target the settings (5a)
or the personal disposition (6b) toward the
resources and activities. Other strategies strive to
expand the potentials (1, 3, 4, 5b, 7b) or to avoid
fixation (2, 3, 4, 5c, 6), by increasing the available
resources or by inducing a change of paradigm
through the use of unfamiliar resources (3, 4, 7a).
So far, we have discussed two approaches to the
study of decision-making. One approach deals with
estimating prospects in uncertain conditions,
focusing on the use of heuristics as cognitive
shortcuts for utilitarian decision-making. Another
approach proposes heuristics as strategies to deal
with creative decisions targeting two types of
activities: (a) activities that involve a large number
of unknowns; (b) activities in which epistemic
targets cannot be established before exploring the
epistemic space. Following Amabile (1996), a tight
definition of creative heuristics may exclude
formalized procedures, or at least it may use
explicit formalization as preparation for decisions
based on implicit cognitive processes. These two
applications of heuristics point to a third avenue of
research involving creative decisions with limited
resources. Arguably, this is the most demanding
case for two reasons: 1. it precludes the adoption
of an explicit epistemic target – which would restrict
the range of creative outcomes – and, 2. it reduces
the availability of support for decision-making. This
second caveat is being addressed by recent
proposals in interaction design (Herrmann 2009),
indicating the need for broad approaches aligned
with the current developments in usability research
(Hornbaek 2006).
3. CREATIVE BIASES
Creative products can be characterized by their
heightened relevance and originality (Weisberg
1993). When placed within the context of group
activities, these two factors may engage opposite
forces (Ferraz & Keller 2014). Widely distributed
resources tend to become more socially relevant
than scarce resources. The downside of easily
available resources is that their originality
magnitude is usually fairly low. Given these
constraints, collective creative products demand
 Aesthetic heuristics in ubimus
Damián Keller, Nuno Otero & Leandro Costalonga
creative decisions that lead to intense sharing of
unique resources. Psycho-economic models of
creativity suggest that the analysis of the flow of
resources may unveil the mechanisms that boost
and constrain creative outcomes (Rubenson &
Runco 1992, 1995; Sternberg & Lubart 1991). If
creative processes were to occur in ideal
conditions, creative decision-making would be
based on objective, rational assessments that
would maximize the use of resources leading to
improvements in both individual and group creative
performance. This is rarely the case. Creative
processes are usually resource-intensive and high
performance levels are very difficult to maintain.
Why is this so?
A possible answer to this question is that creativity-
oriented heuristics are riddled with biases and
unrealistic assessments of prospects. Even if this
weren't the case, and individual decisions tended to
optimize personal creative outcomes, the best
scenario would not necessarily imply good results
for group creative practices. Thus, the study of
creative decision-making – within the field of
aesthetic heuristics – involves at least two
experimental strategies: (1) the analysis of creative
activity to unveil decision biases and; (2) the study
of group creative outcomes to observe mismatches
between individual prospective assessments and
group creative results.
5. WHY DO WE NEED TO STUDY CREATIVE
BIASES?
Creative activities involve the consumption and
production of resources (Rubenson & Runco 1992,
1995; Sternberg & Lubart 1991). Purely rational
decisions would imply an optimal usage of
resources, maximizing the creative output and
ensuring positive impacts on both the material and
social dimensions of the creative outcomes. This is
rarely the case. There are several factors that
preclude an optimal performance in creative
activities. At least three of these factors are related
to the decision-making process involved in creative
activities.
Firstly, effective creative practice is usually very
costly. In teleological activities, the epistemic goal
is set in advance (Fantauzzacoffin & Rogers 2013).
Creative practice is self-reflective (Donald 2006),
meaning that the creative strategies are shaped
during the creative activity rather than before the
activity takes place. The goals are products of the
activity, hence they cannot be fixed a priori.
However, despite the epistemological drawbacks of
the teleological approach, it has been adopted by
several musical creativity theorists (Collins 2005)
because of its low consumption of resources.
Aesthetic creative practice usually demands long
67
stretches of exploratory activity before any specific
goal can be established (Yamamoto & Nakakoji
2005; Keller et al. 2014c). These exploratory
activities consume a large amount of resources.
The logic of the teleological approach is this: if we
restrict exploratory actions to a minimum, the
efficiency of the decision processes will increase.
What we are dealing with here is a bias favouring
low resource consumption at the cost of reduced
process quality. The ability to reshape worldviews
is one of the key features of creative practices
(Donald 2006). This ability may be closely related
to the impact of the activity on the creative
potentials rather than to the solution of well-defined
problems. Large epistemic spaces seem to be a
requisite for the expansion of these potentials.
Second, creative practice is based on and impacts
social relational properties (Keller et al. 2014b).
These properties emerge through ongoing
interactions among agents. Thus, they are
constantly changing but they do not change
abruptly. General creativity frameworks include
persuasion as one of the determinants of the
creative processes (Kozbelt et al. 2012). A similar
proposal has recently been introduced within the
context of computational creativity, labelled framing
(Bown 2014). Both persuasion and framing
demand the active participation of the agents
involved in the activity to manipulate the subjective
value of the creative products.
Third, enactive activities – i.e., activities that have
direct impact on the creative products – are usually
used to measure the effectiveness of creative
performance (Coughlan & Johnson 2006; Runco
2004). This may be misleading. Despite the fact
that enactive activities have an immediate effect on
the material relational properties, they may operate
at very low efficiency levels. This is the case with
novice practitioners. Within the context of group
musical activities, non-musicians participating in
enactive activities tend to produce lots of irrelevant
sonic products – usually defined as creative waste
(Ferraz & Keller 2014). As the agents gain
expertise, the quantity of garbage decreases and
the probability of producing original and relevant
products increase. Concomitantly, the level of
rejection – determined by the standard participants'
acceptance of creative products – may also
increase. Thus, when comparing newbies and
highly skilled participants doing enactive activities
the ratio between the quantity of garbage and the
quantity of products may remain the same, despite
the changes in the quality of the overall output. In
this case, what changes is the profile of the
creative biases. Novices' decisions tend to favour
low resource consumption that lead to low-quality
outcomes, while experts' generally adopt strategies
that lead to high-quality products without the need
to increase resource usage. One way to untangle
 Aesthetic heuristics in ubimus
Damián Keller, Nuno Otero & Leandro Costalonga
the analysis of performance in enactive activities is
to assess both the material output and the creative
biases that underlie the decision-making process.
6. POTENTIAL CREATIVE BIASES AND
PERSPECTIVE OF APPLICATIONS
This section discusses seven examples of what
may constitute distinct creative biases. We provide
definitions applicable both to the musical realm and
to general creativity studies. Finally, we discuss the
implications of aesthetic heuristics for creativity-
centred design, pointing to retailored experimental
strategies that take into account individual biases
and their impact on group creative practices. So
far, we have identified seven examples of creative
biases in the experimental literature on creativity:
instrumentalism, carbon racism, rationalism,
autistic bias, persistence bias, display bias and
magnitude bias.
Instrumentalism: The tendency to assign creative
functions to a device. By focusing exclusively on
the device, the adopted technique predefines the
creative potential of the activity, i.e. treating the
computational resources as if they were acoustic
instruments. One example is the mobile music
instrument Ocarina (Wang 2014). The Ocarina
partially incorporates the affordances of the
acoustic instrument of the same name, letting the
user press the touchscreen of the mobile telephone
as if she were occluding holes of a ceramic
ocarina. This device-oriented approach does not
take into account the actual affordances of the
relationship performer-instrument which are
constructed through the proprioceptive feedback
provided by the real material in conjunction with the
sonic outcome. Another example of
instrumentalism as an unsustainable technique has
been documented by Ruviaro (2012). Laptop
orchestras adopt a European nineteenth-century
hierarchical approach to music making, using
portable computers as orchestral components
without changing the underlying social
assumptions. Given the rapid replacement of
computational devices, within the next few years
most laptop computers will probably end in a
dumpster, burying with them all the music produced
for the laptop format. Thus, laptop orchestras have
been born to linger as historical curiosities, just like
tape music, Wii and Kinect artworks.
Carbon racism: Strong form – only humans can
be creative; weak form – organisms are more
creative than machines. The critical perspective on
this concept has emerged from research on
computational creativity (Bown 2014). The
manifestations of computational creativity show that
algorithmic outcomes can be as creative as non-
technological products (McCormack & d'Inverno
68
2012). When faced with extreme conditions, such
as activities demanding very long stretches of time
or activities that have to be done in harsh
environments, machines are better equipped than
humans to deliver creative products. The cultural
relevance of the technological expansion of human
cognition is well supported by current philosophical
trends (see, for example, the various forms of the
extended-brain hypothesis – Donald 2006;
Hutchins 2010). The extended-brain proposal relies
on key cognitive resources available in the
environment, including both social and material
resources. Within this perspective, computational
resources can be categorized as one form of
material resources (Keller et al. 2014a). As Donald
(2006) suggests, aesthetic activities depend heavily
on material resources for cognitive support. Given
that creative activity demands both behavioural and
material resources, outcomes within technologically
oriented creative practices must make use of
computational support as a source for creativity. In
their strongest manifestations, carbon-biased
approaches stand on the premise that human
groups without technology achieve equivalent
creative magnitudes as the groups that employ
technological resources in their creative practices.
An empirical prediction of the weak carbon-biased
approach is that creative products produced by
humans will attain systematically higher creative
magnitudes than machine products. This may be
be empirically analysed but in order to obtain
ecologically valid results on creative performance,
experiments have to be conducted in everyday
environments where creative activities are carried
out. Most daily environments feature potential
technological support for creative activity in the
form of personal portable devices, wireless Internet
access and various audiovisual transduction
systems. Given these baseline conditions, stripping
participants of all computational support will not
provide information on up-to-date creative activity.
Therefore, advances on the study of the carbon
bias will need to take into account everyday usage
of computational resources, untangling the
cognitive and the computational resource
contributions and caveats.
Rationalism: In principle, purely rational decisions
imply an optimal usage of resources. Thus, they
maximize the creative output, reducing the impact
on both the material and social resources. In
practice, rational decisions require well-defined
problems and constrained epistemic spaces.
Aesthetic decisions are usually highly subjective.
They deal with volatile resources (Keller 2014),
therefore factors and conditions are subject to rapid
changes. They are emotionally and socially
charged, with immediate impact on cognitive
resources. In a nutshell, creative practice deals
with individual and group cognitive states that
involve tight interactions among cognitive and
 Aesthetic heuristics in ubimus
Damián Keller, Nuno Otero & Leandro Costalonga
material resources. As discussed previously,
creative activity implies self-reflection, therefore
part of the necessary resources are produced
during the activity, changing the epistemic space.
Rationality biased decisions ignore the dynamic
quality of creative processes and treat resources as
static. Sometimes this assumption simplifies the
decision-making procedures providing higher levels
of abstraction. For example, simplistic serial
operations such as inversion, retrograde and
transposition can be used effectively to produce
consistent pitch material (cf. Anton Webern -
Symphony no. 21). In spite of their simplicity, over
the course of the twentieth century the mechanistic
application of serial procedures has produced more
sonic garbage than professional creative products.
Another caveat of the rationality bias is ignoring the
implicit factors embedded in decision-making.
Effective support for musical creativity may involve
not only explicit knowledge but also implicit
knowledge gained during the creative activity. In
musical interaction design, supporting reflective
and epistemic activity may prove to be more
important than supporting actions directly related to
sonic resources (Keller et al. 2014c; Miletto et al.
2011).
Given the space constraints of this paper, the
remaining four creative biases will be portrayed
within the context of musical interaction design
decisions.
Persistence biases: prioritize material products
over behavioural products. Thus, design decisions
will favour support for enactive actions rather than
reflective or epistemic actions, i.e. sound-making
tools instead of sketching or planning tools.
High-magnitude biased decisions sacrifice
intuitiveness and simplicity to support highly
idiosyncratic usage. In musical interaction design,
typical examples are: using symbolic notation for
generic event sequencing; supporting synchronous
activity over networks without accounting for the
latency and jitter that degrade synchronous
interaction; simulating hardware controllers as
widgets without supporting the original affordances
of the controllers, e.g. knobs on touchscreens.
Display biases rely on cultural contexts to assess
the relevance of resources and products. From a
musical interaction design perspective,
effectiveness is not measured by the quality of the
sonic product but by the subjective value given to
the instrumental display. This form of bias may
stem from adaptations that emerged from the
selection of honest signals (Zahavi 1975).
Irrelevant and costly features of artistic
manifestations, such as solo instrumental
performances with dozens of keyboards and highly
complex interfaces of analogue modular
69
synthesizers may be manifestations of the display
bias.
Autistic bias stems from the romantic
categorization of art objects as the products of an
inspired genius. This view has extensively been
criticized by recent creativity theorists (Weisberg
1993), pointing to the need of large temporal
investments to achieve professional creative
performance. Despite the growing evidence of the
social grounding of creative manifestations
(Amabile 1996), some domain-specific approaches
to musical interaction insist on placing self-
expression at the centre of the design process.
Gurevich and Treviño (2007) provide a critical
assessment of these proposals highlighting two
trends that have undermined the view of music
making as an individual activity for self-expression:
collaborative music making by novices and the
experimental approaches to composition of the
second half of the twentieth century. These two
forms of creative practice place self-expression as
a secondary by-product of community actions
rather than as an objective to be attained.
Reducing the autistic bias may lead to support for
distributed creativity (Hutchins 2010; Keller et al.
2010), increased engagement (Brian-Kynns 2011)
and smoother learning curves for novice music
practitioners (Miletto et al. 2011; Pimenta et al.
2014).
Biases may shape the personal investments on
creative resources and activities. We have
discussed three creative biases and exemplified
other four using references taken from the musical
creativity and musical interaction literature.
Evidence was gathered on the influence of three
creative biases on design decisions: (1)
instrumentalism has induced a preference for forms
of musical interaction that rely on technical
limitations rather than on aesthetic qualities; (2)
carbon racism has placed overdue stress on
anthropocentric agency, excluding material and
technological support as sources of creativity. An
important aspect of this bias is the procedural
inability to conduct ecologically valid research in
everyday settings; (3) rationalism projects the
notion that creative decision-making is a form of
problem-solving activity. This bias implies that
agents deal with well-defined problems, they base
their decisions on explicit knowledge, and they
have permanent and complete access to resources
7. FINAL WORDS
In this paper we have: (a) provided a working
definition of the proposal, indicating its object of
study, its rationale and the initial experimental
strategies; (b) presented the potential contributions
from interaction aesthetics and ubimus research to
 Aesthetic heuristics in ubimus
Damián Keller, Nuno Otero & Leandro Costalonga
aesthetic heuristics; (c) explored the concept of
creative bias introducing a set of research
questions, examples of creative biases and their
implications in the context of creativity-centred
design.
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