Creativity Support Tools

Support tools are computational tools that allow users quick and easy exploration of interactions which are domain specific. The goal of these tools are to provide users support in hypothesis formation, deeper insights, speedy generation of alternatives and better dissemination of results.

Below is a set of proposed user interface design principles that support rapid exploration and easy experimentation, which fall in line with the goal of support tools:

1. Support exploration
2. Support many different styles
3. Support collaboration
4. Support open interchange
5. Make it as simple as possible
6. Invent things that you would want to use yourself
7. Balance user suggestions with observation and participatory processes
8. Design for designers

For users with a creative side, creativity support tools use computers as a medium to promote creative designs and expressions. They allow users to evaluate these proposed designs and provide easy backtracking.

Creativity support tools generally fall under 4 categories:

1. Sketch-based interaction
2. Tangible user interface
3. Animation
4. Touch interface

The more interesting of these 4 are tangible user interfaces and touch interface. Tangible user interfaces (TUI) allow users to interact with digital information using their physical environment. An example of a TUI is the I/O Brush developed by MIT which allow users to make use of colours, textures and even movement of objects in everyday life to paint their own picture.

As you can see, the I/O Brush is a very simple tool that allows users with no knowledge to catch on to it quickly. In addition, it promotes exploration of the many different styles of painting and drawing. Most importantly of all, there is no limit as to what kind of texture, pattern or colour available for use as the brush is able to pick up anything you wish to use.

Touch interfaces have the ability to recognize the presence of multiple points of contact with the screen surface. This allows the implementation of advanced functions such as pinching/zooming and drawing. One such example of a touch interface is the sand canvas. A sand canvas enables users to create drawings that emulate the task of drawing on sand.

As shown in the video, users make use of many different kinds of hand movements (e.g. hand sweeps, fingertips, canvas pour etc) across the screen surface to create many different scenes. This is a much more interesting way of giving input as compared to simply using a mouse or stylus to draw since our hands are capable of coming up with a bigger variety of movements and textures than the usual input devices we have.

The future of creativity support tools is certainly a promising one. Just by looking at videos of these interesting interfaces makes one's creative juices flow. It certainly made mine flow.

References

1. http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/?id=6
2. http://www.aipo.es/articulos/4/1.pdf