EAGER: Creativity in the Wild: Insight and Discovery with Wearable Sensors

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This project uses the capabilities of wearable sensors for two inquiries into creativity. The first inquiry investigates the potential for analysis and visualization tools to help users generate novel mental models from wearable sensor data and explore the implications of such models on their lifestyle and wellbeing. The ability to monitor internal state and relate it to behavior and environment can be transformational, because it allows users to develop insights and provides them with hard data with which to monitor their own progress. By focusing on minimally-invasive and inexpensive sensors the developments will have broad appeal for the general public. Prior research in wearable sensors has mainly focused on predicting psychological state (e.g., affect) from physiological signals, and characterizing the users? environment (e.g., from accelerometers, audiovisual sensors). However, relatively little research has been devoted to exploring the relationship between the internal (i.e. physiological) state of users and their environments; unfortunately, one cannot be understood without the other. Study of this relationship is an area where we believe visual workspaces can have a significant impact. The second inquiry seeks to explore how wearable sensors may support research in creativity outside of controlled laboratory settings. Experimental methods for creative cognition in laboratory settings have been very successful in identifying a number of cognitive processes and general principles of creativity that apply across a number of domains, from engineering design to the visual arts. However, these studies do not inform us about how creative processes take place in the real world, when users must deal with the demands of their lives and distractions in their environments. Wearable sensors provide an opportunity for the researcher (and the user) to develop an understanding of how physiological variables and real-world environments affect the creative processes. Studies of creative cognition in natural settings, correlating cognitive and behavioral metrics with data from wearable sensors, can validate and greatly extend our scientific understanding of creative thinking in the real world. Whereas retrospective reports of one?s creative ideas are limited by participants? memories and by their subjective introspection, probing people in real-world settings, as proposed in our experiments, requires neither introspection nor retrospection. Thus, validated metrics of creative ideation can be applied in natural contexts without the reactivity that results from laboratory and field experiments.