Environments for Creative Work

Washington, D.C.
The final day of Creativity & Cognition 2007 has begun, and Andrew Warr and Eamonn O'Neill are making a start. The note that design is a collaborative creative process, and that a number of tools for the creation, manipulation and dissemination of externalisations and boundary objects in design. Externalisations, such as sketches, complement verbal communication and allow for the creation of tangible forms for ideas; boundary objects are externalisations that are used to communicate and facilitate shared understandings. For Schön, this enables a design process of seeing-drawing-seeing, facilitating the development of individual and shared understandings and of a common ground in a group, in an iterative process.

The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC) developed by the University of Colorado at Boulder is a table-top device which displays the projection of a shared text, and allows for its collaborative manipulation - a form of social creativity. Andrew and Eamonn evaluated this tool with a group of users conducting city planning exercises and developing new bus routes for the Gunbarrrel area of Boulder; they examined verbal communication, interactions with the EDC, the creation of boundary objects, and interactions with the boundary objects. Key practices of interest in this analysis were problem framing, idea generation, idea framing, and idea evaluation. Verbal communication was prevalent in the problem framing stage; boundary objects were rarely created during that time, and the EDC's pre-defined functionality did not support the ad hoc creation of new objects and object conventions.

In idea generation, the interaction types are more evenly spread; ideas emerged from dry run modes (suggestions made without externalisation and creation of boundary objects) and wet run modes (using the EDC sketch tools to directly externalise and create boundary objects). Boundary objects were created for about a quarter of refined ideas, but three quarters of new ideas. The combination of ideas was rarely observed, such ideas were generated simply by using and combining existing boundary objects rather than creation new ones. Idea framing took place mainly through verbal communication, while idea evaluation took place through verbal communication in complementation with use and interaction with externalisations. Such evaluation practices were limited also by the in-built limitations of the EDC, which allowed only for a limited number of alternative externalisations to be visible at the same time.

Additionally, physical interaction with externalisations took place even when verbal communication had stopped (or as a precursor to verbalisation), such interactions are also easily lost, however, when the physical action stops. Idea generation involved a great deal of trial and error; this also came up against limitations of the tool as this could require the deletion of current externalisations in order to return to earlier ideas. This points to a need to further extend the ability of systems like the EDC to create and manage boundary objects and support users in their engagement with such objects.

Otmar Hilliges is next, and represents a number of co-authors here. He notes the problem of complexity in collaboration, and the need for a wide range of creative inputs into collaborative processes; creativity occurs in the relationship between the individual and society, and between the individual and technology. What socio-technological environments are best suited to creative work, then? The group investigated technology use in collaborative situations, and noted that in most cases, electronic technology use is individual (as in the case of laptops, for example) even where it is utilised in a group context; real group work often continues to take place through older technologies such as whiteboards, paper, post-its, and other shareable media in a three-dimensional, physical environment. This also creates problems of permanence and documentation of results, however. How can the outcomes of group work be stored and shared, then?

The group created an environment involving a digital table-top which allowed users to create post-its on it, share them, move them around, and delete them, as well as linking this to a set of wall screens which were similarly interactive. The system also allows post-its to be clustered and organised in various ways. Several design considerations were important in developing this system: it needed to allow for multiple users to contribute at the same time (avoiding a reliance on single voices at any one time only); it needed to ensure the persistence of ideas created in the group work process and allow for further extension and elaboration beyond the moment of group work itself; it needed to move beyond the segmentation of actions into distinct tasks which is common to standard GUIs, and instead allow for a fluidity of actions; it needed to avoid expensive steps of learning the system, and instead to provide an intuitive interface; it needed to create a sense of mutual visibility of ideas for all collaborators.

This environment was evaluated against more conventional modes of collaboration, and the group found that the new technology did not hinder the process, and subjectively was received very positively by participants. The environment provides for a kind of pseudo-physicality, as well as a meta-physicality which endowed simulated objects with quasi-physical attributes not commonly associated with them (post-its behaving like billiard balls on the screen - ideas literally bouncing off one another); it offered seamless social transitions we as well as greater visibility of social interactions.

Dharani Perera, R. T. Jim Eales, and Kathy Blashki are up next, and Dharani is presenting the paper. They focus on visual artists with upper limb disabilities and investigate the practices of such artists and the potential for technologies to assist them. Most assistive technologies, however, are geared at supporting employment and independent living, not necessarily towards artistic work. The study examined both artists using non-digital tools (head sticks, mouth sticks, foot grips, brush grips for artists with limited upper limb abilities) and and those using digital tools (controlling paint software using eyebrow sensors, speech recognition, and some keyboard commands), and examined their practices in the context of art classes and group environments as well as through online interviews.

Such art work is highly important to many people with upper limb disabilities; it allows for creative expression, communication, and (for some successful artists) financial independence. There is a lack of support for such artists in terms of assistive technology, however; they are forced to adapt existing tools for their purposes, and (in the case of non-digital tools) continue to rely on others assisting them. Non-digital tools can also lead to further injuries because of the unusual body movements they force on their users. There is also limited knowledge about available tools, both amongst the disabled themselves and amongst occupational therapists assisting them. This points to a further need to develop more and better multimodal tools for artistic work to support such creative work.

The last speaker in this session is Tiffany Holmes. As an artist, her work is in highlighting the need for more sustainable engagement with the environment; she is employing creative visualisations of real-time energy consumption patterns to trigger more environmentally responsible behaviour, also involving dynamic feedback into her work. She calls this eco-visualisaton: a real-time, artistic display of data which builds on scientific studies showing that such dynamic data feedback is effective in changing user behaviour, going beyond stand-alone, one-shot environmental information such as An Inconvenient Truth.

Tiffany focusses here on her project 7000 Oaks and Counting; it combines a Website, a kiosk animation, and model trees placed through the building housing her installation. The installation kiosk monitors the energy loads in the building, calculates the carbon emissions from this, and translates this into the number of trees which would need to be planted to offset such emissions; this is visualised through a set of spinning concentric circles ranging from trees and plants to lightbulbs and planes depending on the energy use situation. The Website allows users to nominate energy-saving activities which will offset carbon loads (using bikes rather than cars, installing energy-saving lightbulbs), and such information is collected and displayed through the site. The trees themselves are installed wherever the building provides an opportunity to save electricity consumption (in washrooms, near light switches, around office copiers). In order to track the impact of the piece, the installation also monitors energy consumption in the building over time, as well as tracking whether users carried out the activities they promised, and calculating the carbon offsets achieved this way.

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