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Understanding and Supporting Creativity in Design

Overview

Background and Contribution

HCI involves the design, development and evaluation of interactive systems and the study of their use [Dix et al, 1993; Hewett et al, 1996; Preece, 1994]. The HCI discipline has been described as a 'design-oriented field of research' [Fallman, 2003]. Design in HCI involves the design of interfaces, interactions and experiences [Guidin, 1990; Preece et al, 2002; Wright & McCarthy, 2004].

Design has been described as a process that produces a new or refined product [Alexander, 1964; Coyne, 1995; Ehn, 1989; Fallman, 2003; Jones, 1970; Mayall, 1979; Rasmussen et al, 1994; Rittel, 1984; Schon, 1983; Simon, 1996; Vicente, 1999]. In terms of design in HCI, the product is the interface, interaction or experience. However, what is the process that produces this product?

This process of design has been described as involving a certain 'mystical element' [Fallman, 2003]. Both researchers and practitioners have found it difficult to articulate where their design ideas come from, or even differentiate between the process of generating new ideas and refining them [Rosson et al, 1987]. The 'mystical element' of the process of design has been described using terms such as 'creativity' [e.g. Alborzi et al, 2002; Buur & Bødker, 2002; Fallman, 2003; Guindon, 1990; Rosson et al, 1987].

If creativity in design isn't well understood, it is hard to know how best to support the creative process of design [Johnson & Currthers, 2006; Rosson et al, 1987]. Furthermore, it is argued that the support provided for the creative process of design impacts the quality of the design process itself and its resultant products [Rosson et al, 1987]. Hence, two research questions emerge:

Research question 1: What is creativity in design?

Research question 2: How can creativity in design be supported?

The aim of this project was to answer these two research questions.

In this project an understanding of creativity was developed in the forms of a definition of creativity, metrics and measures of creativity and an understanding of the process of being creative. These contributions were developed throughout the project building upon theoretical work and were refined reflecting upon a series of practical studies.

Furthermore, an understanding of how to support creativity in design was developed by eliciting requirements for creativity support tools, based upon the project's theoretical work and practical studies. The application of these requirements were reflected upon and illustrated through the evaluation of an existing support tool and the design, development and evaluation of a novel creativity support tool - Public Social Private Design (PSPD).

Further reading:

Warr, A. (2006). Situated and Distributed Design. In The Distributed Participatory Design Workshop. At the 4th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer interaction (Oslo, Norway, October 14 - 18, 2006). NordiCHI'06. Available at: http://extra.shu.ac.uk/paperchaste/dpd/

Warr, A. & O'Neill, E. (2004). Getting Creative with Participatory Design. In the Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Participatory Design: Artful integration: interweaving Media, Materials and Practices (Toronto, Canada, July 27 - 31, 2004). PDC'04. 57-61.

Warr, A. & O'Neill, E. (2005). Understanding Design as a Social Creative Process. In the Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Creativity and Cognition (London, UK, April 12 - 15, 2005). C&C'05. ACM Press, 118-127.

Warr, A. & O'Neill, E. (2005). The Effect of Operational Mechanisms on Creativity. In the Proceedings of the 10th IFIP Interaction Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (Rome, Italy, September 12 - 16, 2005) INTERACT'05, Springer-Verlag, 629-642.

Warr, A. & O'Neill, E. (2006). Public Social Private Design (PSPD). In the extended abstracts of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montreal, Canada, April 24 - 27, 2006). CHI'06. ACM Press, 1499-1504.

Warr, A., O'Neill, E. (2006). The Effect of Group Composition on Divergent Thinking in an Interaction Design Activity. In the Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods and Techniques (Penn State College, USA, July 26 - 28, 2006). DIS'06. ACM Press, 122-131.

Warr, A. & O'Neill, E. (2006). Tools for Creativity: Sketching with the EDC and PSPD. In the workshop: "Sketching" Nurturing Creativity: Commonalities in Art, Design, Engineering and Research (Montreal, Canada, April 23). CHI'06. Available at: http://www.kid.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp/chi06-sketch-ws/

Warr, A. & O'Neill, E. (2007). Tool Support for Creativity using Externalisations. In the proceedings of the 6th conference on Creativity and Cognition (Washington D.C., USA, June 13 - 15, 2007). C&C'07. ACM Press.

Warr, A. & O'Neill, E. (2007). Tools To Support Collaborative Creativity. In the workshop: Tools in Support of Creative Collaboration - at C&C 2007, 13-15 June 2007, Washington D.C., USA.

References

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