When DA VINCI Met Wallas: Extended Modeling of the Creative Process

By positing the centrality of process-oriented definitions of creativity, the article revisits Graham Wallas's The Art of Thought, showing that its legacy extends beyond the canonical four-stage model for the creative process. We first extract from Wallas's book some lesser known details that are proxies of metacognitive and emotional control. Second, we trace a century of theoretical development in models of the creative process, discussing how progress in psychological science enabled the birth of the study of creative cognition. Third, we present a detailed comparison between Wallas and the DA VINCI model, which describes the creative process through five interacting mental states: DAV (drive, attention, volition), information, novelty generation, creativity estimation, and implementation. To account for the dynamic nature of the creative process, this model introduces explicit transition states that mediate state transitions during the process, formalizes inspiration as the deliberate admission of “irrelevant” information that enables escape from dominant ideas, and allows for serendipity via divergent creativity estimation. Finally, we outline implications for modeling the cyber-creative process in the age of generative AI. The article thus offers an integrative framework that honors Wallas's seminal insights while advancing a dynamic, multi-level model suited to contemporary human–AI creative collaboration.