BCNM Best Paper Award at Creativity & Cognition 2022
BCNMers Molly Nicholas, Sarah Sterman, and Eric Paulos received a Best Paper Award for "Creative and Motivational Strategies Used by Expert Creative Practitioners" at the 14th ACM conference on Creativity & Cognition, which takes place June 20-23, 2022.
Since 1993, this conference series brings together artists, scientists, designers, educators, and researchers to more deeply understand how people engage individually and socially in creative processes and how computation and other technology can affect creative outcomes.
The conference will explore the themes of creativity, craft and design that are strongly connected to Venice. After our virtual conference in 2021, which opened up Venice to the world, in 2022 the world will come to Venice to discover, engage with and learn about creativity, craft and design, including how craft and design is reshaping the Venetian region.
From the abstract:
Creative practice often requires persevering through moments of ambiguity, where the outcome of a process is unclear. Creative practitioners intentionally manage this process, for example by developing strategies to break out of creative ruts, or stay motivated through uncertainty. Understanding the way experts engage with and manage these creativity-relevant processes represents a rich source of foundational knowledge for designers of Creativity Support Tools. These strategies represent an opportunity for CST research: to create CSTs that embody emotional and processfocused strategies and techniques. Through interviews with expert practitioners in diverse domains including performance, craft, engineering, and design, we identify four strategies for managing process: Strategic Forgetting, Mode Switching, Embodying Process, and Aestheticizing. Understanding tool- and domain-agnostic creative strategies used by experts to manage their own creative process can inform the design of future CSTs that amplify the benefits of successful strategies and scaffold new techniques.