Computers and Creativity: Help? Hindrance? Irrelevance?

Software	None
Covers	HCI, psychology, design (of all sorts), research into beliefs and attitudes
Skills Required	Interest in HCI, interest in psychology, ideally strong interest in some creative field, possibly interest in artificial intelligence
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ?? Programming

Brief Description

Over the last several decades, computers have changed working practices in a wide range of creative fields, often changing how people do their creative thinking and sometimes changing the end product. What older creative practitioners see as restrictive and limiting, their younger colleagues may see as a source of creative power and opportunities, and maybe both are right. Among people who know nothing about computers and nothing about design, beliefs are widespread about creative designing as free and untrammelled and likely to be blocked by the least constraint, and about computers as dull and mechanical and inimical to creativity. Such beliefs also turn up among people who do know about design or about computers. But the world is changing. What do people think about how computers influence designing and other creative activities?

The challenge of this project is to study and report on beliefs and attitudes concerning what designing is, what creativity is, what computers can and can't do, and how computer software might help or restrict or bias creativity - and relate these beliefs to to what is known about the reality of designing and creative thinking.

Variants

The research for this project could focus on contrasting different groups of people with different kinds of knowledge or influences on what they think. However an alternative and likely better approach might be to focus tightly on one industry where the types of thinking and the role of various computer tools can be identified, and looking primarily at the attitudes of practising designers towards computer tools (likely to be very pragmatic) and creativity (likely to be very wrong), as well as how these attitudes relate to individuals' experiences and preferred working practices (likely to be very varied).

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