This is live blogging coverage of Ben Shneiderman’s colloquium today, entitled: “Creativity support tools: Accelerating discovery and innovation.”
NOTES:
As people are walking in to what will be a packed room, Ben is pulling up old photo galleries showing profs in the 1960s.
3p start
Creativity support tools: Accelerating discovery and innovation
Ben Shneiderman
* founding director (since ’83) of HCI lab
* his first job was at IU
* gave a talk last night (hmmm … SOI didn’t let us know about it)
* background in databases, growing into a perspective of “20% social psychologist”
* impressed with how the Informatics program is working here
* authored “Designing the User Interface”
* worked on “embedded menus” (which Tim Berners-Lee would eventually call “hot links”)
Spotfire
* gender and age differentiated births in DC … filter by age, birth weight, plurality (how many kids in same birth, i.e. twins) … sociologist not surprised by this data, but interesting for Ben
* not a walk-up-and-use tool … a collaborative tool
Treemap
* stock market, clustered by industry … market falls steeply on Feb 27, 2007 with one exception (small green square in map of red)
* used for discovery … detect insurance fraud, supply chain management, patterns of oil wells (underproduction), newsmap (overview of news stories), gene ontology
* scalability … illustrated by server IP map
Reasserts the human as the discoverer, rather than the machine
SciViz vs. InfoViz
Patternfinder
* patient histories … spotfire-esque controls to filter by age, turn on/off genders … filter by events, like white blood cell count -> purple dots indicate matches in the field … two-criteria -> matches in “ball and chain” to further filter data sets, by stringing together more criteria
* lots of temporal constraints that are difficult to specify otherwise
* 2006 paper published in Visual Analytics conference
* Patternfinder 3 -> flash based, but created new problems … coming to understand what kinds of queries we can do in seconds, minutes or days
– interface for specifying queries (past SQL)
– execution of these things
– display of the result set (find patterns in a large data set very easy)
how do you prove that this leads to discovery?
* surrounded by skeptics who question the HCI endeavor
* http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007
NSF provided $50K for an art exhibit
trying to transform the discipline … visualization is not a far out thing, but something we should do as computer scientists
Creativity Support Tools:
GOALS:
– more people, more creative, more of the time … multi-disciplinary endeavor: software engineers, scientists, architects, product/graphic designers, educators, students, humanists, new media artists, musicians, composers, writers, poets, screenwriters … open the space up (Flash allows for many more people to produce films on YouTube; Dramatica Pro – brilliant implementation of Theory of the Story, by Robert McKie, guru of Hollywood screenwriters … 250 questions, to build structure of his story)
– Looking for “normal science” (evolutionary, product design, engineering, music & art) … Not revolutionary breakthroughs/paradigm shifts … nor impromptu everyday creativity … the things we do can be helped by providing better tools
Key Sources:
* Creativity (1996) [based on interviews with many creative people] and Finding Flow (1997) … Csikszentmihalyi
* Sternberg – Handbook of Creativity (1999) and International Handbook of Creativity (2006) … computer, HCI doesn’t appear in the index -> opportunity for us to make a contribution (how the tools might reshape creativity)
* National academy of science – Beyond Productivity: information technology, innovation and creativity (2003)
* Richard Florida – Rise of the Creative Class (2002) [communities that work with creativity have to work in certain ways – controversial], Flight of the Creative Class (2005)
* eric von Hippel – Democratizing Innovation (2005) [support open source]
1) Structuralists: A plan, method, process
– Dan Couger (1006) reviews 22 “creative problem solving methods” … preparation, incubation, illumination, verification -> French words, 1945 book on a mat mentor, cataloging the creative methods he used
– Treemap solution came as an aha moment (3 days for 6 lines of recursive code after that)
– Atman’s design steps: problem definition/identify need, gather info, generate ideas, modeling, feasibility analysis, evaluation, decision, communication, implementation (from Design thinking research symposium 2003)
– combinatoric exploration, structured problem solving (Russian TRIZ, Arrowsmith), self-help books, business consultants
2) Inspirationalists: Aha, Aha, Aha!
– free associations (brainstorming, ideation, Thesauri, photo collages, random stimuli, inkblots)
– breaking set (getting away to different locations, working on other problems, mediating, sleeping, walking)
– visualization (concept maps/2D networks of ideas, sketching)
3) Situationalists: context, community, collaboration (takes a long time, depend on social group)
– Personal history – family history, parents, siblings, challenging teachers, inspirational mentors
– Consultation – experts and friends, information and empathic support, early/middle/late stages
– Motivations – fame, legacy, admiration, contribution and competition (finding right motivations can facilitate collaboration)
– CREATIVE PEOPLE need: mentors and support/cheerleader (empathic support)
Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity (1993)
1) Domain – “consists of a set of symbols, rules and procedures” (i.e. biology)
2) Field – “the individuals who act as gatekeepers to the domain … decide whether a new idea, performance, or product should be included” – your creativity does not mean anything until you gain recognition from the domain, understand and please members of the field
– most rejections fail to reference the right people in the field
3) 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”
– early stages -> fear of ridicule, stolen ideas
– aggregate individual work, but it happens “in between the ears”
not quite a requirements doc for a computer project, or a research statement, so …
Eight Activities:
* searching and browsing digital libraries – look at your own work and find where Google doesn’t work (Google is great at finding single bits of information)
* consulting with peers and mentors
– facilitate getting the right information (how do we track collaborations)
– spotfire’s success is based on the ability to collaboration
* visualizing data and processes
* thinking by free associations
– expand horizons, make surprising connections
– ex. Arrowsmith
* exploring solutions (what if tools)
* composing artifacts and performances
– starting points: exemplars, templates, processes
* reviewing and replaying session histories
– replay should be a natural part of design
– ctrl-Z allows you to navigate and go back, but you can view/search/send
* disseminating results
– journal publication is slow, email doesn’t help too much
– I would like to send emails to referenced authors (~200) and send paper for review, confirmation
– I would like to know people who cite, download papers and communicate with them
(from “Creating creativity: User interfaces for supporting innovation” – ACM TOCHI, March 2000)
SideViews (Terry and Mynatt 2002) – instead of trial and error, get a picture of many versions at once to select
Guidelines for creativity support tools
– support exploration & collaboration
– support many paths and many styles
– low threshold, high ceiling and wide walls (… and more)
– initiate by exemplars, templates and processes
Evaluation methods:
– ethnographic observational situated … multi-dimensional, in-depth, long-term, case studies (domain experts doing their own work for weeks and months) -> MILCs
MILC
* evaluate socialAction
– focused on integrating statistics and visualization
– 4 case studies, 4-8 weeks (journalist, bibliometrician, terrorist analyst, organizational analyst)
– identified desired features, gave strong positive feedback about benefits of integration
* paper accepted to CHI 2008 (Perer & Shneiderman, 2007)
– very interesting visualization showing senators with bills they voted together … first separates into party lines, then shows cohesion among Democrats as the number of supported bills gets higher
– discovery by Chris Anderson, user of the tool (US News and World Report)
Creativity challenges:
1) evolve new theories and evaluations
2) understand creativity across disciplines
propose innovative:
– individual (creativity support tools)
– group (socio-technical environments) -> need to think about number of collaborations, there are some special things that make social networks succeed
great room for HCI and computer scientists
HCIL 25th Annual Symposium – May 29-30, 2008 (University of Maryland)
Science 1.0 -> reductionist, controlled experiments, replicability, laboratory, natural world … hypothesis testing, predictive hteories, replications
Science 2.0 -> integrated, case studies, validity, situated, made world … hypothesis testing, predictive theories
Abstract:
Creativity Support Tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high payoff. The goal is to develop improved software and user interfaces that empower diverse users in the sciences and arts to go beyond productivity and be more creative. Potential users include a combination of software and other engineers, diverse scientists, product and graphic designers, and architects, as well as writers, poets, musicians, new media artists, and many others. Enhanced interfaces could enable more effective searching of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams, and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces should also provide potent support in goal setting, speedier exploration of alternatives, improved understanding through visualization, and better dissemination of results (demos will be shown). For creative endeavors that require composition of novel artifacts (computer programs, engineering diagrams, symphonies, animations, artwork), enhanced interfaces could facilitate rapid exploration of alternatives, prevent unproductive choices, and enable easy backtracking. This talk provides a framework for systematic study of creativity. Two key issues are (1) Formulation of guidelines for design of creativity support tools (2) Novel research methods to assess creativity support tools. These issues were addressed at the June 2007 Conference on Creativity and Cognition (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007).
Biography:
Ben Shneiderman (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/) at the University of Maryland. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM ) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. Ben is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (1980) and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (4th ed. 2004) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/ . He pioneered the highlighted textual link in 1983, and it became part of Hyperties, a precursor to the web. His move into information visualization helped spawn the successful company Spotfire http://www.spotfire.com/ . He is a technical advisor for the HiveGroup and ILOG. With S. Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999). His books include Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press), which won the IEEE Distinguished Literary Contribution award in 2004.