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National Science Foundation Creativity Support Tools Workshop Report
Co-Author

Report Summary:
Creativity Support Tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high payoff. The goal is to develop improved software and user interfaces that empower users to be more productive, and more innovative. Potential users include software and other engineers, diverse scientists, product and graphic designers, architects, and many others.

Enhanced interfaces could enable more effective searching of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams, and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces should also provide potent support in hypothesis formation, speedier evaluation of alternatives, improved understanding through visualization, and better dissemination of results. For creative endeavors that 

require composition of novel artifacts (computer programs, scientific papers, engineering diagrams, symphonies, artwork), enhanced interfaces could facilitate exploration of alternatives, prevent unproductive choices, and enable easy backtracking.

This NSF-sponsored workshop brought together 25 research leaders and graduate students to share experiences, identify opportunities, and formulate research challenges. Prepared presentations in the mornings provided structured reviews of previous work, while open discussions in the afternoon encouraged broad participation and new directions. Two key outcomes emerged:

1. Formulation of guidelines for design of creativity support tools.
2. Novel research methods to assess creativity support tools.

​In summary, the workshop participants converged on three highly desirable goals. We are eager to:
Accelerate research and education on creativity support tools by:

• Making the case for increased funding for creativity support tool research
• Encouraging investment in substantial multi-year longitudinal case studies
• Proposing ways to create greater interest among researchers, students, policymakers, and industrial developers.
• Provide appropriate software infrastructure and toolkits so that creativity support tools can be more easily built.

Promote rigorous multidimensional evaluation methods by:

• Understanding the benefits and limits to controlled experimentation
• Developing observation strategies for longitudinal case studies
• Collecting careful field study, survey, and deep ethnographical data

Rethink user interfaces to support creativity by offering guidelines for:

• Design tools for individuals and socio-technical environments for groups.
• Promote low thresholds, high ceilings, wide walls, and powerful history-keeping
•  Support exploratory search, visualization, collaboration, and composition