SoD-TEAM: Developing Computational Tools that Facilitate Individual and Group Creativity in the Early Stages of Design

本研究解决了界面设计界出现的最关键的问题之一——个人设计师和设计师群体对计算工具的访问，这些工具在设计的早期阶段促进而不是抑制创造性思维的过程。设计的早期阶段是交互系统设计师首先考虑设计解决方案的概念、内容和布局以及期望的交互行为。这些阶段至关重要，因为研究表明，最终设计方案的70%都是在这个阶段确定的。由于设计师在更短的时间内产生有效的解决方案的压力越来越大，他们在这些早期设计阶段转向使用计算机工具，但大多数计算机工具从未被开发出来支持创造性思维，因此可能会产生相反的效果。由于界面通常占整个开发工作的50%以上，软件密集型项目无法在设计周期的后期纠正早期阶段的创造性失误。设计和创意理论解释说，创意过程可以通过支持素描、替代表示、并行处理多个想法和协作的组合来促进。考虑到这一点，PI将首先开发一种视觉草图语言（VSL），允许设计师在非正式的设计工具中绘制内容和行为的草图。该工具将嵌入到一个运行时系统中，该系统允许执行草图设计，从而产生功能原型，通过该原型可以更好地评估设计。为了设计VSL， PI将收集使用低保真工具构建原型的设计师进行实地研究，并将分析他们的问题解决策略，以得出他们的概念模型。PI还将开发非正式工具的群件扩展，使小型设计团队（由2-5个用户组成）能够有效地并行处理多个想法并有效地协作。方法是让每个团队成员在他或她的个人设备上运行PI的非正式工具，所有这些设备都联网到一台机器上，驱动一个提供共享视觉工作空间的大型显示器。交互式图标地图将在本地界面上显示设计的缩略图。一旦连接，功能将允许每个设计单独配置为私有（仅在本地访问）；公共（可查看但不能被其他人编辑）；并且共享（其他人可以查看和编辑）。通过允许单个设计师查看不同的想法（那些由其他设计师创造的想法），并允许团队重新解释或修改彼此的想法，或产生新的想法，将促进团队创造力。最后，随着项目的进展，将进行严格的评估，以量化PI的方法和开发的工具的效用。这些评估的结果将提供迄今为止最广泛的证据，证明计算工具如何影响交互系统设计中的个人和群体创造力。更广泛的影响：这项工作的结果将推动如何设计计算工具的科学，更好地促进设计早期阶段的创造性思维。开发的软件、实证结果和从这项研究中吸取的经验教训应该适用于许多设计和创造性问题解决的情况，在这些情况下，草图、替代表示、并行处理多个想法和协作是至关重要的。这包括其他交互设计领域，以及建筑、工业、图形和机械设计。

This research addresses one of the most critical problems emerging in the interface design community - access by individual designers, and groups of designers, to computational tools that facilitate rather than inhibit the process of creative thinking in the early stages of design. The early stages of design are when interactive systems designers are first thinking about the concept, content and layout, and desired interactive behavior of a design solution. These stages are critical, as studies show that's when 70% of a final design solution is determined. As designers are increasingly pressured to produce effective solutions in less time, they are turning to the use of computer tools in these early design stages, but most computer tools were never developed to support creative thinking and could thus have the opposite effect. As the interface often accounts for over 50% of the overall development effort, software intensive projects cannot afford to correct creative lapses in the early stages later on in the design cycle. Design and creativity theory explain that the creative process can best be facilitated by support for a combination of sketching, alternative representations, working with multiple ideas in parallel, and collaboration. With this in mind, the PI will first develop a visual sketching language (VSL) that allows designers to sketch representations of content and behavior within an informal design tool, This tool will be embedded within a runtime system that allows the sketched designs to be executed, thereby producing functional prototypes through which designs can be better evaluated. To design the VSL, the PI will collect conduct field studies of designers building prototypes using low-fidelity tools and will analyze their problem solving strategies to elicit their conceptual models. The PI will also develop a groupware extension to the informal tool, that allows small design teams (consisting of 2-5 users) to work efficiently with multiple ideas in parallel and to collaborate effectively. The approach is to have each team member run the PI's informal tool on his or her personal device, all of which are networked to a single machine driving a large display that offers a shared visual workspace. An interactive iconic map will show thumbnail representations of designs on the local interface. Once connected, functionality will be available that allows each design to be separately configured as private (only accessible locally); public (viewable but not editable by others); and shared (viewable and editable by others). Group creativity will be facilitated by allowing individual designers to view different ideas (those created by other designers), and by allowing the group to re-interpret or modify each other's ideas, or to generate new ones. Finally, rigorous evaluations will be conducted as the project progresses, to quantify the utility of the PI's approach and of the tools developed. The results from these evaluations will provide the most extensive evidence to date of how computational tools affect individual and group creativity for interactive systems design.Broader Impacts: The results of this work will advance the science of how to design computational tools that better facilitate creative thinking in the early stages of design. The developed software, empirical results, and lessons learned from this research should be applicable to many design and creative problem solving situations in which sketching, alternative representations, working with multiple ideas in parallel, and collaboration are paramount. This includes other interactive design domains as well as architectural, industrial, graphics, and mechanical design.