Section: New Results

Creativity

Participants : Sarah Fdili Alaoui [correspondant] , Carla Griggio, Shu Yuan Hsueh, Wendy Mackay, Baptiste Caramiaux, Joanna Mcgrenere, Midas Nouwens, Jean-Philippe Riviere, Nicolas Taffin, Philip Tchernavskij, Theophanis Tsandilas.

ExSitu is interested in understanding the work practices of creative professionals, particularly artists, designers, and scientists, who push the limits of interactive technology. We follow a multi-disciplinary participatory design approach, working with both expert and non-expert users in diverse creative contexts. We also create situations that cause users to reflect deeply on their activities in situ and collaborate to articulate new design problems.

We conducted an interview study of 23 contemporary music composers and choreographers where we focused on the role that physical artifacts play in shaping creative collaborations with performers [13]. We found that creators and performers form relationships where the creator acts as a author, a curator, a planner, or a researcher and the performer acts as an interpreter, a creator, an improvisor, or an informant. Furthermore, we found that creators sculpt, layer and remix artifacts, moving fluidly across these different forms of interaction throughout the creative process.

We studied Kinaesthetic creativity which refers to the body’s ability to generate alternate futures [21]. We probe such creative process by studying how dancers interact with technology to generate ideas. We developed a series of parameterized interactive visuals and asked dance practitioners to use them in generating movement materials. From our study, we define a taxonomy that comprises different relationships and movement responses dancers form with the visuals. We describe resulting types of interaction patterns and demonstrate how dance creativity is driven by the ability to shift between these patterns.

We used technology probes to understand how dancers learned dance fragments from videos [15]. We introduced MoveOn, which lets dancers decompose video into short, repeatable clips to support their learning. This served as an effective analysis tool for identifying the changes in focus and understanding dancers decomposition and recomposition processes. Additionally we compared the teacher’s and dancers’ decomposition strategies, and how dancers learn on their own compared to teacher-created decompositions. We found that they all ungroup and regroup dance fragments, but with different foci of attention, which suggests that teacher-imposed decomposition is more effective for introductory dance students, whereas personal decomposition is more suitable for expert dancers.

We ran a workshop [25] at ACM Creativity and Cognition that explored how distributed forms of creativity arising in play can help guide and foster supportive research, game design, and technology. We brought together researchers, game designers, and others to examine theories of creativity and play, game design practices, and methods for studying creativity.

We developed a taxonomy [18] on technologies using Defamiliarization to to support Co-Creation in choreographic practices. Regarding intersection of choreographic practice and HCI, Sarah Fdili Alaoui [16] describe her research and creation journey of an interactive choreographic dance piece called SKIN. This generated a set of research questions that she addresses through experience explicitation interviews of both audience and creative team members on the lived experience of making and attending the performance and the emergent relationships between dance, media and interaction as well as the tensions and negotiations that emerged from integrating technology in art. She discusses her approach as anti-solutionist and argue for more openness in HCI to allow artists to contribute.

Finally, we assessed the inter-rater reliability of the Laban Movement Analysis system used in choreography and dance notation [11].