Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) play a fundamental role in the study of creativity in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Even so, there is no consensus definition of the term 'CST' in HCI, and in most studies, CSTs have been construed as one-off exploratory prototypes, typically built by the researchers themselves. This makes it difficult to clearly demarcate CST research, but also to compare findings across studies, which impedes advancement in digital creativity as a growing field of research. Based on a literature review of 143 papers from the ACM Digital Library (1999-2018), we contribute a first overview of the key characteristics of CSTs developed by the HCI community. Moreover, we propose a tentative definition of a CST to help strengthen knowledge sharing across CST studies. We end by discussing our study's implications for future HCI research on CSTs and digital creativity.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3290605.3300619

Mapping the Landscape of Creativity Support Tools in HCI

Sketching designs has been shown to be a useful way of planning and considering alternative solutions. The use of lo-fidelity prototyping, especially paper-based sketching, can save time, money and converge to better solutions more quickly. However, this design process is often viewed to be too informal. Consequently users do not know how to manage their thoughts and ideas (to first think divergently, to then finally converge on a suitable solution). We present the Five Design Sheet (FdS) methodology. The methodology enables users to create information visualization interfaces through lo-fidelity methods. Users sketch and plan their ideas, helping them express different possibilities, think through these ideas to consider their potential effectiveness as solutions to the task (sheet 1); they create three principle designs (sheets 2,3 and 4); before converging on a final realization design that can then be implemented (sheet 5). In this article, we present (i) a review of the use of sketching as a planning method for visualization and the benefits of sketching, (ii) a detailed description of the Five Design Sheet (FdS) methodology, and (iii) an evaluation of the FdS using the System Usability Scale, along with a case-study of its use in industry and experience of its use in teaching.

/pdf/sketching-designs-using-the-five-design-sheet-methodology-z65v1wu8lq.pdf

Sketching Designs Using the Five Design-Sheet Methodology

Creative writing, from poetry to journalism, is at the crux of human ingenuity and social interaction. Existing creative writing support tools produce entire passages or fully formed sentences, but these approaches fail to adapt to the writer's own ideas and intentions. Instead we posit to build tools that generate ideas coherent with the writer's context and encourage writers to produce divergent outcomes. To explore this, we focus on supporting metaphor creation. We present Metaphoria, an interactive system that generates metaphorical connections based on an input word from the writer. Our studies show that Metaphoria provides more coherent suggestions than existing systems, and supports the expression of writers' unique intentions. We discuss the complex issue of ownership in human-machine collaboration and how to build adaptive creativity support tools in other domains.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3290605.3300526

Metaphoria: An Algorithmic Companion for Metaphor Creation

Applied visualization researchers often work closely with domain collaborators to explore new and useful applications of visualization The early stages of collaborations are typically time consuming for all stakeholders as researchers piece together an understanding of domain challenges from disparate discussions and meetings A number of recent projects, however, report on the use of creative visualization-opportunities (CVO) workshops to accelerate the early stages of applied work, eliciting a wealth of requirements in a few days of focused work Yet, there is no established guidance for how to use such workshops effectively In this paper, we present the results of a 2-year collaboration in which we analyzed the use of 17 workshops in 10 visualization contexts Its primary contribution is a framework for CVO workshops that: 1) identifies a process model for using workshops; 2) describes a structure of what happens within effective workshops; 3) recommends 25 actionable guidelines for future workshops; and 4) presents an example workshop and workshop methods The creation of this framework exemplifies the use of critical reflection to learn about visualization in practice from diverse studies and experience

/pdf/a-framework-for-creative-visualization-opportunities-2y3ofq939i.pdf

A Framework for Creative Visualization-Opportunities Workshops

This article analyses the characteristics of digital journalism studies through an empirical investigation of all articles published in the journal Digital Journalism, from its launch in 2013 to is...

/pdf/what-does-digital-journalism-studies-look-like-4jfk7dbn5l.pdf

What Does Digital Journalism Studies Look Like

This paper reports the design and first evaluations of new digital support for journalists to discover and examine crea-tive angles on news stories under development. The support integrated creative news search algorithms, interactive crea-tive sparks and reusable concept cards into one daily work tool of journalists. The first evaluations of INJECT by jour-nalists in their places of work to write published news sto-ries revealed that the journalists generated new angles on existing stories rather than new stories, changed their writ-ing behaviour, and reported evidence that INJECT use had the potential to increase the objectivity and the boldness of journalism methods used.

/pdf/making-the-news-digital-creativity-support-for-journalists-r6kfjdwajs.pdf

Making the News: Digital Creativity Support for Journalists

A tool that helps journalists discover new story angles by offering insight not search results.

/pdf/digital-creativity-support-for-original-journalism-41wfrn3ctk.pdf

Digital creativity support for original journalism

This paper reports the evaluation of a new digital support tool designed to increase journalist creativity and productivity in newsrooms. After outlining the tool's principles, interactive features and architecture, the paper reports the installation and use of the tool over 2 months by 12 journalists in the newsrooms of 3 newspapers. Results from this evaluation revealed that tool use was associated with published news articles rated as more novel but not more valuable than published articles written by the same journalists without the tool. However, tool use did not increase journalist productivity. The evaluation results were used to inform future changes to the digital creativity support tool.

/pdf/evaluating-the-use-of-digital-creativity-support-by-56gmxs1eal.pdf

Evaluating the Use of Digital Creativity Support by Journalists in Newsrooms

Creativity workshops have proved effective in drawing out unexpected requirements and giving form to participants' novel ideas. Here, we introduce a new addition to the workshop designer's toolkit: interactive data visualization, used as stimuli to prompt insight and inspire creativity. We first describe a pilot study in which we compare the effectiveness of two different styles of data visualization. Here we found that a less ambiguous style was more effective in supporting idea generation. Following this, we report a case study in which we employ data visualization within a service design workshop, where participants gain insights that are later realized in design ideas.

/pdf/using-data-visualization-in-creativity-workshops-a-new-tool-1ok5cz9gza.pdf

Using data visualization in creativity workshops: a new tool in the designer's kit

Existing digital tools used by journalists such as content management systems and search engines focus on helping journalists find relevant information and organize their creative work; they do not provide support for discovering creative angles to investigate To meet this need in journalism, we have researched new creative search algorithms that manipulate the journalist's primary medium - written information - and developed an innovative creativity and productivity support tool deliberately for use by journalists In this paper, we analyse the creative tasks journalists perform when developing new stories, we provide an overview of requirements, which have been addressed by the INJECT digital creativity support tool for journalists Further, we explain the intended use of the system using a walkthrough scenario and present our early experiences from deploying the tool in journalist's working environments

/pdf/creative-information-exploration-in-journalism-51ycgjrsoj.pdf

Amanda Brown

Papers

Making the News: Digital Creativity Support for Journalists

Digital creativity support for original journalism

Evaluating the Use of Digital Creativity Support by Journalists in Newsrooms

Using data visualization in creativity workshops: a new tool in the designer's kit

Creative Information Exploration in Journalism