Characterizing Creativity in Visualization Design

Understanding the role of creativity in visualization design becomes increasingly important as the field matures, particularly with the emergence of various visualization authoring and recommendation systems. In this paper, we examine how creativity manifests in visualization design processes and how academic research has conceptualized it over time. Through a systematic review of 58 visualization papers that use the terms "creativity" or "creative," we analyze the evolution of creative practices in visualization design. Our findings show that prior literature predominantly used atypical designs through free-form drawings, infographics, pictorials, and data comics to define creative representations. However, creativity in visualization design extends beyond visual representations to encompass early needfinding design activities such as sketching, storyboarding, discussion, and card sorting. Data visualization can also support a wide variety of creative tasks (e.g., fiction writing). We discuss the implications of these findings for fostering innovation within established design paradigms and for developing more sophisticated visualization authoring systems. The full list of coded papers are available here: https://vizcreativity.notion.site/coded-papers.