Computers Aided Creativity

Computer Aided Creativity

Software	None
Covers	HCI, psychology, design (of all sorts)
Skills Required	Interest in HCI, interest in psychology, ideally strong interest in some creative field
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. Increasingly, with the rise of mobile devices, people rely on computers for thinking work as well as relatively mechanical tasks. But can computer software and hardware do as well as pencil and paper, or better, at supporting the imaginative creative thinking that is a crucial part (even if often a small part) of many jobs in many industries? What would an effective computer tool for creative work look like, and is it technically feasible?

The answer to this is going to depend on the nature of the creative tasks (which may be radically different in different situations), and the nature of creative thinking (while people have different talents and preferences, human psychology is universal). It will also depend on how well the device and its software fits the users' needs. What the device makes simple or easy will bias what the users do; it might subtly restrict users to only a small subset of the ideas they could have produced without it, or with a better tool. Paradoxically, constraints are often crucial to creativity, but does the computer tool impose the right ones, or help the user set the right ones?

The challenge of this project is to investigate what is involved in creative thinking and how computer systems can provide an effective environment for it, and how they can facilitate or hinder thinkers achieving what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi terms "flow", as well as investigating how well some of the tools creative thinkers use work, and how they influence what they do, and the positive and negative consequences this has.

Variants

This project could be tightly focused on a particular creative activity, such as storytelling, or graphic design, or knitwear design, or...

A rather different project would to be to study how an existing computer tool for design or some other creative activity actually influences how people design and where the creativity in producing new stuff actually lies.

Back to