The Art of Interaction. Ernest Edmonds
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“The design of creativity supporting computer systems is now firmly on the research agenda” (Candy and Edmonds, 1996).
Creativity had become an HCI research issue.
As mentioned above, Loughborough University, where the Creativity and Cognition conference series began, was an early and very strong HCI research center. Hence, the conference series developed in an HCI climate and by 1999 it had been adopted by ACM SIGCHI as a sponsored conference, which it remains today. Since then the range of conferences and publications in the area has expanded vastly. Funding bodies have also taken an interest. In the late 1990s, the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council added the topic of supporting creativity to its definition of interesting areas of HCI. In 2005, the U.S.’s National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored a high-level workshop on Creativity Support Tools in Washington DC (Shneiderman et al., 2006).
The NSF workshop can be seen as a pivotal event in relation to HCI and creativity: “This U.S. National Science Foundation sponsored workshop brought together 25 research leaders and graduate students to share experiences, identify opportunities, and formulate research challenges. Two key outcomes emerged:
1. encouragement to evaluate creativity support tools through multidimensional in-depth longitudinal case studies; and
2. formulation of 12 principles for design of creativity support tools” (Shneiderman et al., 2006).
The evaluation outcome was to recommend that the way forward should focus on “multiple metrics and evaluation techniques based on long-term in-depth observations and interviews over weeks and months with individuals and groups.” Twelve principles were identified that provide a valuable check list.
1. Support exploration.
2. Low threshold, high ceiling, and wide walls.
3. Support many paths and many styles.
4. Support collaboration.
5. Support open interchange.
6. Make it as simple as possible—and maybe even simpler.
7. Choose black boxes carefully.
8. Invent things that you would want to use yourself.
9. Balance user suggestions with observation and participatory processes.
10. Iterate, iterate—then iterate again.
11. Design for designers.
12. Evaluate your tools.
Art has increasingly appeared in the topic lists of computing conferences. For example, the ACM conference CHI, has recently embraced art within its scope, i.e., holding a paper session on “Art, music, and movement” in 20111 and featuring both the Digital Arts and the Games and Entertainment communities in 2012. By 2016, it held its first fully fledged exhibition of interactive art.2 Thus, a new agenda was added to HCI research that addressed the challenge of how to enable people to become more creative in whatever pursuit they followed.
Much of the work referred to is concerned with what is sometimes called “every-day creativity.” We will see, however, in a later chapter, that the creative arts and the kind of exceptional creativity that particularly excites our admiration has much to teach us in HCI and in enhancing that everyday creativity.
2.4 TOWARDS A NEW HCI VOCABULARY
In one sense, the vocabulary normally used within a subject defines its scope. If we look at the ACM CHI conferences, for example, we find that in the proceedings of the first meeting, in 1981, the word “creative” turns up once and the word “productive” turns up 95 times. In 2011, by contrast, “creative” occurs in 141 contributions, whereas “productive” is only used in 41. So we see a shift in interest in the community, as discussed previously, illustrated simply by the vocabulary used.
In a quick scan of the paper titles from 1981/82, I notice words such as:
• command
• programming
• explanation
• documentation
• friendliness
• lexicon
• performance
• effectiveness
• productive
• learning
• stress
• search
• thesaurus
• icon
• menu
• scrolling
In 2011, in a similar scan, I see:
• sharing
• persuasive
• creative
• reflection
• emotion
• engaging
• experience
• expressive
• aesthetics
• touch
• feel
• gesture
• sensing
• multitasking
• multimodal
• pointing
By 2017, I can add:
• harmony
• moods
• awareness
• presence
• empowered
• mindfulness
• empathy
One might say that there is a move from routine work and productive concerns to human and creative ones. The frequency of the use of the words “productive” and “creative” themselves in the CHI conferences changed from the 95 (productive) to 1 (creative) in 1981 to, typically, parity by 2016.
These may only be word lists, however, behind them we can see the research agenda in HCI. The research questions that are being addressed are framed using these words. Of course, my scan of the literature was hardly rigorous, but the drift is clear. Today, we live in a world much more concerned with human creativity, with emotion, experience, and feelings, than we did in 1981. Artists are at the center of the development of new creative paths. That is why the argument of this book, this lecture, is that it is increasingly valuable for the HCI world to look at and to learn from the world of art. As I live in both of those worlds, and can demonstrate the value of HCI to art, I think that I am in a good position to assert that the benefits are reciprocal. I will elaborate on this in Chapter 3.
1 http://chi2011.org/program/program.html
2 https://chi2016.acm.org/wp/art-exhibition/
CHAPTER 3
Learning from Interactive Art
3.1 A LITTLE ART HISTORY
We may often think in terms of emotion and feeling when we look at, or listen to, art. In the theatre we may see a production that exudes magic. But the works we see and hear are, of course, made by careful and informed hard work, certainly not by magic. The image of a mad genius pouring out their anguish or joy has little to do with the reality of making art. Vincent van Gough