people were dreaming about the magic of the DynaBook, of children “playing” with computers, and with the user’s enjoyment. A famous critical event was the visit by Steve Jobs, and others from Apple, to Xerox PARC in 1979 (Isaacson, 2011: 96). They saw the prototype machines with bitmap displays, using a mouse and emulating the use of paper and printing on the screen. Jobs was not slow to say that this was the future and that Apple needed to produce it, albeit at a tiny fraction of the cost. This was the start of the commercial move towards DynaBook and the 1984 launch of the Apple Macintosh computer.
In the second CHI conference, held in 1982, Tom Malone presented a paper about designing enjoyable user interfaces.
“In this paper, I will discuss two questions: (1) Why are computer games so captivating? And (2) How can the features that make computer games captivating be used to make other interfaces interesting and enjoyable to use?” (Malone, 1982).
This might be seen as the start of the research effort to look at user engagement and enjoyment as significant research and design issues.
Naturally, a concern for engagement and enjoyment points to the need to look hard at user experience. Kevin Biles’ 1994 paper in Computer Graphics, “Notes on Experience Design”, set the agenda:
“Technology, no matter what it is, isn’t the entertainment. The integration of technology needs to be seamless in an attraction, always letting the story and the overall experience take the front seat” (Biles, 1994).
The HCI trend from “ease of use” to “user experience” is the human side of the trend described by Jonathan Grudin as “tool to partner” (Grudin, 2016). Much of Grudin’s more detailed history can be interpreted in this human-oriented way, but, as I will show, there are trends that hardly focus on the computer side of HCI at all. In that respect, one particularly significant issue is embodiment. In the broad sense, this is concerned with understanding interaction in the physical and social context in which it takes place (Dourish, 2001). The concern for embodiment in art is sometimes very specifically about interaction that takes the body and movement fully into account, as in the case of dancers and performers. See the case that I discuss in Section 5.4.
In the next section, I will describe how recent developments have been bringing HCI closer to the human values found in art by concentrating on the support that can be offered to enhancing human creativity.
2.3 ON TO ENHANCING CREATIVITY
An interest in creativity began to flower in the Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Design communities at the end of the 1980s. The “First International Conference on Computational and Cognitive Models of Creative Design” was held on a Great Barrier Reef island in 1989 and turned into a regular series (Gero and Maher, 1989). Margaret Boden (1991) published her book, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, in 1991. The main thrust of this kind of work was in building and critiquing computational models of creative processes, but some designers and members of the HCI community also took a strong interest. They had a different focus, that of envisaging how computational systems might support and enhance human creativity.
This development seemed a natural extension to the HCI concerns for engagement and enjoyment. We were no longer locked into an HCI focus that emphasised work (the “easier and more productive use of computer systems” of the first CHI). Instead, interest was growing in entertainment, art, and pleasure. The values had changed. Of course, it turned out that a considerable amount of work involves creativity. Creativity in the Design domain was first to receive significant attention. It was found that the older emphasis on work was, in fact, on routine tasks: copy editing, for example, rather than writing a screen play.
In 1993, the first Creativity and Cognition conference was held at Loughborough University in the UK. This conference, and the many that followed, took a strong multidisciplinary approach in what was initially an exploration of a possible new area:
“…the cognitive modeling of creativity, the empirical study of the creative process and the theoretical reflection upon its characteristics are of concern to everyone involved whether artist, designer, philosopher, cognitive scientist, or computer scientist” (Edmonds, 1993).
By the 1996 meeting of this conference series (as it had become) the primary goal of supporting human creativity became clear:
“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
