- So, thank you for showing up to everyone.
This is a lit review paper,
and it's rather late so hopefully
this won't be too boring of a talk.
I've tried to put in a lot of examples here
to sort of keep it a bit more engaging
considering we're late in the evening,
or in the afternoon.
The paper that I will present today
is sort of a truly collaborative effort
together with my colleagues from
Center for Digital Creativity at Aarhus University.
Lindsay MacDonald Vermeulen, Christian Remy,
Michael Mose Biskjaer, and Peter Dalsgaard.
And I can't really take all the credit for this,
because this is something that we've been working
on for a very long time,
and we've put a lot of hours into this,
each and every one of us.
During the past 30 years or so,
computers and digital tools have been playing
an ever-increasing role in almost all aspects of our life.
This is not least true for creative activities,
whether they be young children expressing themself
using a tablet for making fanciful drawings
or professional creatives such as graphic designers,
architects, or music producers.
For which, InDesign, 3D modeling software,
or Logic Pro X are essential tools.
Digital tools for creativity support
are often referred to as "creativity support tools"
within the literature, and that's the term I'll be using
throughout the rest of the presentation.
So, it's previously been shown
that this trend of addressing creativity related research
within the CHI has also, is also growing.
This is an increase in interest
for the field of HCI.
Also, relatively speaking,
the number of applications is growing
but, relatively speaking, the number of HCI publications
addressing creativity is also increasing,
or is increasing relatively more.
And generally speaking, the CSTs develop,
they're quite diverse in the sense
that they address a lot of different aspects
and they run on different devices and such.
So we might have an example like this, Motif,
which is a super-cool, smartphone-based
video recording and editing tool
that supports novice videographers.
Creativity through expert heuristics.
Over at InspirationWall, which is an exciting CST and
tends to run on larger displays,
that leverages speech recognition
to enhance an ongoing collaborative ideation session
by automatically retrieving and resending stimuli
related to the conversation.
Or another recent, very cool, creativity support tool,
the CritiqueKit, which leverages interactive guidance
to improve feedback on creative work.
So, this very diverse landscape,
we've tried to provide a characteristic of.
And what I'm going to present today
is only a snapshot of some of those characteristics.
You can obviously look more in the paper
but this is sort of the very broad overview
of the landscape at the moment.
We sampled 143 of the most influential
creativity support tools out there.
We did it using citations as a proxy for influence.
And in case you're wondering,
it took quite a long time to read all of these papers.
And we qualitatively coded them
in eight different categories
and this coding was done by three individual coders,
myself as one of them.
And we have structured the results
in three different areas.
One of the byproducts of doing this type
of reviewing is that we end up
with a very, very comprehensive coding scheme,
which you could, I guess, refer to
as sort of a taxonomy for creativity support tools.
You can find this in the paper.
I'm only going to be talking
about some of the aspects here today.
But, yes, this is one of the byproducts
that we are actually quite happy about today,
with this paper.
But it doesn't really fit well
in a presentation like this.
So, I'm going to highly three findings.
The first one is, in terms
of the creativity support tools themselves.
The second is, insights on the findings
or the research on the creativity support tools.
And finally, I'll talk a bit
about future directions for this type of work.
First of all, the creativity support tools.
Looking at the device that these tools
are designed to be used on,
we can see that the laptop or the PC is
by far the most popular device
to design for when designing and developing CSTs.
A good example of this would be this IdeaHound
which is a very cool CST intended for,
that integrates the task of defining semantic relationships
among ideas into the primary task
of actually doing the idea generation itself.
The second largest group of devices supported
is this miscellaneous, which doesn't really tell you much.
But basically it contains specially built hardware,
in some cases, often in conjunction
with laptop PCs or existing, sort of,
commercially available tools.
A very good example of this nice polyphony,
which integrates interactive paper
and stylus-type input devices
to enable a more fluid transition
between informal sketches and more formal,
computer-based representations of music compositions.
Surprisingly enough, at least for us,
there's quite a lot of tangibles out there,
or tangible user interfaces out there
to support creativity support.
And a nice example of that is this Naruhodo Button,
which means something like, "Ah, I see!" in Japanese.
And it's a symbol and quite cool way of,
sort of a physical equivalent of the Facebook "like button"
that seeks to mitigate evaluation apprehension
during face to face brainstorming.
One of the things that also surprised us
is that there are very, very few smartphone-based
creativity support tools.
And one of the very, very good examples
of such a tool could actually be the StoryKit
which, I believe is still available on the App Store today.
And it's an authoring tool
that uses the media-capturing components
of a smartphone to enable rich story composition
for children in the wild.
If we move on to another, sort of, description
of the creativity support tools,
we tried to code for complexity.
And obviously, complexity can mean a lot of things.
But the first, here, low complexity,
we mean one or two single features
for a very clearly defined and explicit use case.
And an example of this could be Aquamarine,
which is a very powerful tool
that does one thing very, very well,
and it provides an alternative to this linear undo model.
You probably know if you've ever done something
with Photoshop or something like that,
that if you undo, it's always going to be linear.
This actually provides an alternative to this model
and as such, it does such a very little thing
but very, very well.
Medium complexity means several features
supporting several activities
but still within a somewhat, sort of defined use case.
And a recent example of this is Inject,
which is a sidebar for the Google Docs
for journalists, and supports concurrent ideation
and exploration of articles during the writing process.
So while you're writing you can sort of explore
new takes on the story that you're working on.
And finally you have a limited amount
of highly-complex creativity support tools
and a canonical example of this is this i-Land
from 1999 which almost reflects the Wisen dream
of using wall-sized displays and tabletops
and personal computers and tablets, and so on.
There's very briefly about the tools themselves.
Now, we'll talk a bit about, I'll talk a bit about
the research of the tools.
And one of the things that we looked at is,
what part of the creative process
is actually supported by these creativity support tools?
But to do so we needed a rough outline
for the creative model, and this is just,
basically a very basic mapping of the creative process
with four steps, preideation, idea generation,
implementation, and evaluation,
and then during the coding we realized
that we also needed a couple of "meta steps"
or something that doesn't really fit
into this linear creative process.
Or, well, model of the creative process.
And in this case, we have iterations, so tool set support,
the actual going over several iterations
of the creative process,
or managing or planning the process as it unfolds.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, idea generation and implementation
and to some degree, also evaluation
is relatively well-supported.
I've already talked about tools
such as IdeaHound or Naruhodo,
which are obviously for ideation,
and this Aquamarine, or Polyphony,
which could be considered tools
for implementing creative work.
I wanted to provide you with an example
of something that would be considered pre-ideation.
And an example of such is this Momentum,
which is a tool that, before you
enter the ideation session you actually,
you illicit some topic-oriented responses
that you then want to be prompted for
during the ideation session.
Something that helps your structure
before this ideation part.
And another rare example of one of the two middle levels,
in this case iteration, is MetaMorphe,
which is a framework for exploring
many different alternatives for,
that allows for a more flexible iteration
of three-dimensional design models.
So that's a bit on the part of the creative process here.
Finally, most of the CSTs that we've reviewed,
they are currently inaccessible to researchers
of the public,
meaning that the URL provided in the paper yields a 404,
basically isn't there anymore,
and if you Google search for the name of the tool
you can't really find it anywhere online.
So that's also, sort of, a by-finding
or one of the partial findings of doing such a review.
If I then move to some of the future directions,
or points for discussion for future directions
is probably what they are,
one of the things that I kind of want to highlight here
is that, most of the CSTs out there
are low complexity or medium complexity
and they support ideation.
And then one of our question is,
how do we then best take in the level of expertise
for some of the target users into account
when studying these CSTs?
For example, do we need to adjust our evaluation methods
to include more creative professionals?
Or do we need to consider the use
of more complex creativity support tools?
Because arguably there's a big difference
between, let's say, Adobe Photoshop,
which has hundreds of different features,
and then a low or medium complexity creativity support tool.
And also, a lot of the idea generation
actually unfolds concurrently
while you're implementing or evaluating or working
on the thing that you're actually producing.
Which, to be fair, is supported by a tool like Inject
but most of the tools have a very distinct division
of the phases in the creative process.
Additionally, most of the CSTs are,
as I just mentioned, unavailable.
This might be obvious if the tools
were special-built hardware that doesn't really scale,
but I showed on one of the very fist slides
they're built for tablets and for desktop computers,
and so it's basically software, most of it,
and this could be made available
with very little effort.
Considering that, we asked the question,
"How can we make it easier to build on previous research?"
Or even support this trickle-down
of some of the more novel
or experimental creativity support tools
to be picked up by the creative professionals
and the communities out there, who, I hope,
are willing to experiment with different tools out there.
So those are some of the points for discussion.
I will thank you for your time,
and I'll be happy to take your questions.
- (audience applauds)
- [Moderator] We, oh, lots of questions. Yeah.
I can see that we have four or five questions, so, yeah.
If you could please keep your questions fairly short.
- [Woman] Okay.
I wonder if you were able
to reflect on how these tools narrow down,
a little bit, the creative task.
Meaning, how do you define it, or how,
even more so than defining it,
how do you define the actions that people do
and how does that, by definition, narrow it down,
versus allow for more?
Yeah. Is that part of your analysis?
- The answer may, if I understand your question correctly,
you're asking for the idea of,
what is the creative activity?
- [Woman] Yeah, what I have in mind is that,
in a way, when we define what the task is,
we kind of narrow it down based
on something that is a little smaller than what it is.
So, I'm always a little cautious about CSTs in that sense,
and I wonder if you have looked at that
in the systems you have.
- I wouldn't say directly but in some sense we did,
because a lot of the CSTs consider
the magic of creativity as something that happens
when you get the idea.
So that's maybe a partial answer to your question.
Getting the idea, or getting the right,
or the good idea is actually the creative magic
that happens.
- [Woman] And that always happens
when you're in front of the device?
- No, not necessarily, but obviously that's,
that might be a consequence of designing
for that specific situation. That's all you see.
- [Woman] Thank you.
- Thank you.
- [Moderator] Please raise your hand
when you have-- (audience member coughs)
We have a ton of questions, so
we'll take two or three more questions
and then I'll ask you go and talk to outside, apologies.
- [Dr. Fiebrink] Hi, Rebecca Fiebrink, from Goldsmiths.
First of all, thanks so much for doing this work,
I think you've made a nice resource
that I hope to share with students.
I had a comment and I'm curious
how you would respond to this,
so certainly what you've done here
says something about the landscape of CSTs out there
that researchers have been making,
but I would argue that it actually
says quite a lot about the kinds of CSTs
that people choose to publish at CHI
and other related ACM venues,
and, you know, personally, when I'm making something
that's very complex I don't tend to submit it to CHI
because I don't have the confidence
that reviewers are going to be familiar enough
with the specific domain to understand what I'm saying
in a fairly short paper.
And so I might question some
of the general stats that you mentioned today.
So, curious what you have to say.
- No, that is a very, very good point.
We also used the average citation
as a cutoff point to crop down, basically,
the amount of CSTs that we looked for,
so these are the CSTs that people are most engaged in.
I mean, you could propose a hypothesis
that people cite the easiest-ly understandable tools,
if that makes sense?
- [Dr. Fiebrink] Very much, yeah.
- So I think you have a very good point there.
- [Moderator] Thank you.
More questions? We had four.
Yeah.
- [Man] Thank you. Yeah, very related to that,
it seems to me that what is easily isolatable as,
that's where the creativity happened,
which is ideation, is that's what gets designed for
and that's what gets published on.
So related to that, have you seen any way of,
in your taxonomy, in the implementation,
where arguably, the overwhelming amount
of creative work happens, lots of adaptive reasoning,
lots of having ideas and trialing out
during the process of making, to sort of,
in your taxonomy, to zoom into that,
and to identify subtypes of that,
or to identify little interventions in that,
in something like, oh, they're using Word and Excel
as part of their creative process,
a lot of the making happens in that,
in those kind of, sub-processes, or as part of the work.
- That's a very good idea. (laughs)
I think I'll have to look into that,
now that you mention it. Thank you.
(audience laughs)
- [Moderator] We have the time for one more quick question,
that was here on the front row.
I know that there are more up here,
but we also need to make time for the following papers.
- [Woman In The Front Row] Hi. I wanted to ask about,
if you can talk about any design directions
more specific to tangible CSTs?
- I think you would have to come in
and see me afterwards for that. (laughs)
To be honest. Thank you.
- [Moderator] Let's give Jonas another round of applause.
(audience applauds)