Weekly Schedule

Part 1: Models of Human Creativity

Week 1

Tuesday Jan 7th— Introduction to course

Jan 7th Detail

Thursday Jan 9th — Models of Creativity and Trends in HCI Creativity Support

Assigned Reading (to be completed prior to class):

Hennessey, Beth A. and Amabile, Teresa M., Creativity (January 2010). Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 61, pp. 569-598, 2010. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1601146 or http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100416

 The Trouble with “Creativity” by John Baer from Sternberg, R., & Kaufman, J. (Eds.). (2018). The Nature of Human Creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108185936

Ben Shneiderman. 2007. Creativity support tools: accelerating discovery and innovation. Commun. ACM 50, 12 (December 2007), 20–32.

Week 2

Thursday Jan 14th — Creative Process

Assigned Readings:

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 2009. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Chapter 4, The Conditions of Flow

Schon, D.A. Designing as reflective conversation with the materials of a design situation. Research in Engineering Design 3, 131–147 (1992) doi:10.1007/BF01580516

Thursday Jan 21st — Creative Learning

Assigned Readings:

Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms (1993) Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. Foreword and Chapter 6.
(Optional) Reflection Prompt

Reflect on a significant positive learning experience in your life- in school or otherwise. How do the principles presented by Papert on qualitative experience align with or diverge from your personal experience?

Week 3

Thursday Jan 16th — Creativity and Workmanship

Assigned Readings:

McCullough, M. 1998. Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand. Chapter 7: Medium, MIT Press.
Ingold, Tim. (2010). The textility of making. Cambridge Journal of Economics. 34. 91-102.
Reflection Prompt

Select an example of a favorite medium or material you’ve used at some point in your life. In line with the ideas of affordance and/or textility, describe the creative processes imposed by your selected medium. Bring an example of the medium to class on Tuesday (photograph, physical sample, etc.)

Tuesday Jan 23rd — Collaborative Creativity

Assigned Readings:

Gerhard Fischer. 2004. Social creativity: turning barriers into opportunities for collaborative design. In Proceedings of the eighth conference on Participatory design: Artful integration: interweaving media, materials and practices - Volume 1 (PDC 04). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 152–161.

Reflection Prompt

Fischer defines four dimensions of social creativity: Spatial, Temporal, Conceptual Within Domains, Conceptual between Domains, and Technological. Thinking back to a collaborative experience you directly participated in, select one of these four dimensions and describe specific barriers or opportunities that you encountered in your personal experience.

Part 2: Developing Creative Technologies

Week 4

Tuesday Jan 28th— Assignment 1 Presentation and Review

Thursday Jan 30th

No Class

Week 5

Tuesday Feb 4th—Understanding Experience

Assigned Readings:

Kristin N. Dew and Daniela K. Rosner. 2018. Lessons from the Woodshop: Cultivating Design with Living Materials. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 585, 1–12.

Jennifer Jacobs and Amit Zoran. 2015. Hybrid Practice in the Kalahari: Design Collaboration through Digital Tools and Hunter-Gatherer Craft. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 619–628.

David A. Mellis and Leah Buechley. 2014. Do-it-yourself cellphones: an investigation into the possibilities and limits of high-tech diy. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1723–1732.

--- optional ---

Laura Devendorf and Kimiko Ryokai. 2015. Being the Machine: Reconfiguring Agency and Control in Hybrid Fabrication. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2477–2486.
Reflection Prompt

The assigned readings showcase three strategies for informing the design of technologies: ethnograpy, collaborative making, and autobiographical design. Describe the strengths and limitations of these different strategies as you see them.

Thursday Feb 6th— Interaction Design Principles

Assigned Readings:

M. Resnick and E.O. Rosenbaum. 2013. Designing for Tinkerability. In Design Make Play: Growing the Next Generation of STEM Innovators, M. Honey and D. Kanter (Eds.). Routledge.
Reflection Prompt

Resnick and Rosenbaum motivate their principles for tinkerability with regards to the opportunities tinkerable systems provide for learning and education. Discuss how tinkering is or is not relevant to professional practice, or expert-level production.

--- optional ---

Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle (Talk)

Week 6

Tuesday Feb 11th — Interface Design Strategies

Assigned Readings:

John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi, and Shelley Evenson. 2007. Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’07). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 493–502.

Houde, S., and Hill, C., What Do Prototypes Prototype?, in Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction (2nd Ed.), 1997.
Reflection Prompt

The Makey Makey (which we experimented with in the previous class) is a technology for making user interfaces. Using the Makey Makey as an example, discuss its benefits and limitations as a prototyping technology and as a technology for conducting research through design. Compare your evaluation of the Makey Makey with how prototyping and research through design are presented in the respective readings.

Thursday Feb 13th — Broadening Participation 

Assigned Readings:

Cynthia L. Bennett and Daniela K. Rosner. 2019. The Promise of Empathy: Design, Disability, and Knowing the “Other.” In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 298, 1–13.

Turkle, S., & Papert, S. (1991). Epistemological pluralism. In I. Harel & S. Papert (Eds.), Constructionism (pp. 161-191). New York: Ablex Publishing Corporation
Reflection Prompt

Both readings center on the challenges of understanding (or empathizing) with the experience of others. They communicate fundamental limitations in the ways in which designers can effectively empathize with those outside their own experience. How do these challenges align with your own experiences in creative production or collaboration? Are there scenarios in which you have felt unable to understand the experience of a person you were designing for or working with? Alternatively, how have your own experiences biased you towards valuing some forms of knowing or production over others?

Week 7

Tuesday Feb 18th —Supporting Creative Technology Use

Assigned Readings:

Ellen Yi-Luen Do and Mark D. Gross. 2007. Environments for creativity: a lab for making things. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition (C&C ’07). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 27–36.

Roque, R. & Jain, R. (2018) Becoming facilitators of creative computing in informal learning contexts. In Kay, J & Luckin, R., Rethinking learning in the digital age: Making the learning sciences count: The International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2018, Volume 1 (pp. 592-599). London: International Society of the Learning Sciences
(Optional)Reflection Prompt

Both readings present the idea of "not knowing", or removing the notion of "expert" as a key component to facilitating creativity. From your perspective, what are the benefits of putting aside the ideas of "expert" and "novice" in a creative setting? What are the challenges?

Thursday Feb 20th— Strategies for Testing and Evaluating Creative Technologies

Assigned Readings:

David Ledo, Steven Houben, Jo Vermeulen, Nicolai Marquardt, Lora Oehlberg, and Saul Greenberg. 2018. Evaluation Strategies for HCI Toolkit Research. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 36, 1–17.

(Optional)Reflection Prompt

Ledo et. all describe four evaluation strategies for toolkit research: (1) demonstration, (2) usage, (3) technical evaluation, and (4) heuristic evaluation. Thinking about past technologies you have built in your own research, or technologies you are interested in developing going forward, which of these evaluation strategies is most appealing/ and relevant. Why?

Week 8

Tuesday Feb 25th— Assignment 2 Presentation and Review

Thursday Feb 27th — In the Wild

Assigned Readings:

Leah Buechley and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2010. LilyPad in the wild: how hardware’s long tail is supporting new engineering and design communities. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ’10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 199–207.
(Optional)Reflection Prompt

Based on our discussion of creative practice, describe, from your perspective, the benefits in-the-wild evaluation offers as a way to understand the opportunities and limits of a creative tool or technology? What are the limitations or challenges? Why do you think in-the-wild evaluation is rare in HCI research overall?

Week 9

Tuesday March 3rd — Dissemination Practices and Final Project Assignment

Thursday March 5th — Course Reflection

Assigned Readings:

Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Maxine Cohen, Steven Jacobs, Niklas Elmqvist, and Nicholoas Diakopoulos. 2016. Grand challenges for HCI researchers. interactions 23, 5 (August 2016), 24–25.

No reflection prompt. Instead complete the 1-2 paragraph description of your planned final project idea.

Week 10

Tuesday March 10th - Final Project Check in

Thursday March 12th - Final Project Check in

Finals Week

Final Papers Due March 20th