Wednesday afternoon (18 Apr), Ben Shneiderman gave a CAS/MillerComm Lecture entitled, “Creativity Support Tools: A Grand Challenge for HCI,” at GSLIS.
Ben was the Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland.
[I will abbreviate Creativity Support Tools as CST.]
CST: Goals:
“more people, more creative, more of the time”
productivity support is vastly different than creativity support
what is meant by “more” creative?
perhaps there is a common underlying process of creativity
Key Sources:
Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity (1996), Finding Flow (1997)
Sternberg (Ed.): Handbook of Creativity (1999), International Handbook of Creativity (2006) [narrower, interested in the process, dismissive of the deBono et al popularization-types]
National Academy of Sciences: Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation and Creativity (2003) [broad view in entertainment & arts] [supposedly online for free]
Florida: Rise of the Creative Class (2002); Flight of the Creative Class (2005)
von Hippel: Democratizing Innovation (2005) [supposedly online for free]
3 themes found in his readings
1 Structuralists: A plan, method, process
Polya’s How to Solve It (1957)
understand the problem
devise a plan
carry out the plan
look back
Couger (1996) reviews 22 “creative problem solving methodologies”
preparation
incubation
illumination
verification
Atman, et al (U Wash) design steps [Design Thinking Research Symposium 2003]
Combinatoric exploration
Structured problem solvingTRIZ (Russian)
ArrowsmithSelf-help books
2 Inspirationalists: Aha, aha, aha!
Free associations
brainstorming, ideation
thesauri, photo collages
random stimuli, inkblotsBreaking set
get away to different locations
working on other problems
meditation, sleeping, walking
(drugs, alcohol, sleep deprivation,..)Visualization
Concept Maps: 2-d networks of ideas
sketching
[1st 2 assume lone problem solver and a straightforward process]
3 Situationalists: context, community, collaboration
Personal history
family history, parents, siblings
challenging teachers, inspirational mentorsConsultation
experts & friends
information & empathic support
early, middle, late stagesMotivations
fame, legacy, admiration
contribution & competition
Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity (1993)
- Domain: “consists of a set of symbols, rules and procedures”
- Field: “gatekeepers to the domain … decide whether a new idea, performance, or product should be included”
- Individual creativity is “when a person … has a new idea or sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion in the relevant domain,” thus, individual creativity is socially constructed/sanctioned
8 activities (for software support)
searching and browsing digital libraries
consulting with peers & mentors
visualizing data and processes
thinking by free association
exploring solutions – what if tools
composing artifacts and performances
reviewing and replaying session histories
disseminating results
[Creating creativity: User interfaces for supporting innovation ACM TOCHI, 3/2000]
(every one of these has a negative / limits users)
Evaluation Methods: Ethnographic
multi-dimensional
in-depth
long-term
case studies (more of a hypothesis testing approach with a small n sample)
MILCs
Guidelines for CST
support exploration & collaboration
support many paths & many styles
low threshold, high ceiling & wide walls, i.e., easy to get started, becoming an expert is difficult, accomplishes many things
… and more
Initiate action by:
- exemplars
- templates
- processes
Creativity challenges:
evolve new theories and evaluations
understand creativity across disciplinespropose innovative
individual CST
group socio-technical environments
3 responses so far ↓
1 Jenn // Apr 20, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Well, now I wish I would have gone to this, but I *was* in class. Csikszentmihaly! Someone I’ve actually read!
2 Christina Pikas // Apr 21, 2007 at 8:27 am
Very cool notes. Every time I’ve heard him talk it’s been about info viz so this is really interesting. von Hippel did a lot of stuff on open source software. His new book is indeed online for free (http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm) — I started reading it in print from the library and really enjoyed it. Jill and I talked (for our CIL work) about innovation creativity because it involves planning and execution… interesting that structuralists group this in.
3 Mark // Apr 21, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Sorry, Jenn, about making you feel you missed something again.
But as we discussed, it should be available from somewhere soon; perhaps even with video.
Thanks, Christina. He used some of the info viz stuff as examples, but more so as static screen shots “illustrating” a slide, although he did give a very quick demo of one or two visualization tools in support of a point about creativity.
And thanks for the link for the von Hippel. I felt like I ought to have tried finding them myself and including them (he did not give them, just mentioned that they were), but since I have no time to look into them right now I decided to let the librarians who read this and who are interested do their own searching. Besides, since “librarians like to search…” I figured who was I to rob them of their pleasure.