We’re extending the deadline for our workshop at the Creativity & Cognition conference to 4/20. If you’re a creator who enjoys analyzing your own creative practice, a designer seeking to parameterize the design space for creative tools, or a researcher interested in the interplay of artistic process and scientific methodology, please submit! We have some funds available for struggling students, too.

Supporting Creative Acts Beyond Dissemination

UPDATE: Funding support (for conference fees & travel) is available for all accepted position statements.

Extended Deadline: CFP due April 20th, 2007.

Artists, philosophers, and scientists have been developing conceptual models of creativity for centuries. Yet developers of media art and technology are often accused of interfering with ‘the creative process’ when they rely on such formalisms to guide their designs. This workshop will look at creativity as a collection of conceptual models for the construction and dissemination of media arts, music, performance, and tools. We are interested in conceptualizations that explicitly or implicitly inform the system design and may be realized in part or whole in a system. These conceptualizations may have originated with philosophers (e.g. Hegel and Dewey), artists (e.g. Kandinsky and Duchamp), or scientists looking at cognitive, social, and computational aspects of creativity.

Furthermore, with new media, the distinctions between creator-centric and experiencer-centric creativity are blurring. Practically, this blurring results in an endlessly evolving stream of artifacts that are “finished” when their participatory roles are fulfilled. This raises questions about where the creative act begins and ends, and has implications for the design of tools to support creative work, as well as for the creative work itself, from art installations where the participants can shape the work’s meaning and purpose to new educational tools and environments that seek to introduce learners to creative collaboration. This conflation of the role of creator and experiencer forces us to reconsider models that cleanly separate the two and to seek out new models in which the “user” takes on a creative role, not just an interpretive or interactive one.

This workshop presents the design of several contemporary creative models for new media in theory and in practice. The primary goal is to foster multidisciplinary communication and collaboration by discussing implementable models of creative acts. The workshop will provide an opportunity to present and discuss:

• New models and novel combinations of existing models
• Critiques of existing models
• Examples (successful or unsuccessful) of applications of creative models
• Applications and/or installations which embed or embody specific models for creativity
• Qualitative studies of creative processes

The focus will be on bridging creative theory and creative practice with practical applications for creative arts and technology, from installations to the tools that support them. Along the way, we hope to develop new models for understanding creative processes in which participants and creators are one and the same.

Twitter’s enormous usage spike during SXSW was definitely felt back in the Bay Area, where I noticed the spike in mentions of Twitter in my RSS feeds, created my own Twitter account, and heard friends and colleagues discussing similar experiences. Though their gratuitous use of AJAX makes the site a bit painful to use while it is having growing pains (lots of unanswered XMLHttpRequests), overall I dig the Twitter aesthetic of minimalism with attention to details. It almost seeks to disappear. One detail I particularly like is the way long URLs are automatically fed through TinyURL, to save space in these messages meant for SMS and other forms of low-bandwidth communication.

This got me to thinking that Twitter’s parents are really services like TinyURL, little useful things that you hardly consider websites–just someplace you quickly stop by on the way to something else. Things like YouSendIt, ZShare, WatchThatPage, and of course del.icio.us. (In fact, Twitter is really just del.icio.us with a different attitude, and no requirement that your minutiae have a URL attached.) The best of these sites strive to disappear. The worst try to trap you, keep you dallying about, perhaps looking at ads, for a bit while you wait for a Javascript timer to count down or some such inanity. This may increase profits in the short run at the expense of long-term growth, as the commodity nature of this class of “utility” software means that people will gravitate toward the least annoying service. Twitter succeeds because it is as unobtrusive as possible for software that is all about being as obtrusive as possible.

Jason Calcanis claims that Wikipedia’s complex markup language is designed to limit participation. I agree that Wikipedia markup functions to limit participation, but I do not agree that it is consciously designed to do so. Rather it is an unfortunate consequence of a markup language completely unconstrained by standards, which makes it very powerful and flexible for “insiders” but discourages the development of tools and systems which might make it easier to use for “outsiders.” The lack of standardization in wiki markup also means that users can’t transfer what they’ve learned from other wiki systems, such as the ones they might have running on their company intranets.

In response to Jason’s critique, some people have floated the idea of creating a WYSIWYG Wikipedia editor. This is a good idea in theory, but in practice it would be quite difficult to keep such a tool up-to-date, as Wikipedia markup is a moving target. Much of the complexity Calcanis cites is due to complex macros that various people have added to handle things like citations. These macros are constantly under revision, and new ones are always being added. Tracking these changes in a editing tool would be a serious pain in the ass.

Paul Graham on why research should be communicated through working systems (hacks) rather than through research papers:

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

and why adaptive design works:

The only external test is time. Over time, beautiful things tend to thrive, and ugly things tend to get discarded.

From Graham’s Hackers and Painters, which I re-discovered recently. Good stuff on entrepreneurship, too:

If you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you… The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications. That’s where you can win big by taking the bold approach to design, and having the same people both design and implement the product.