Lab Lunch Talk - 17 may 2000 - 12 Noon - ARCH 049

Collective Creativity through Amplifying Representational Talkback: the Use of Two-Dimensional Positioning as a Means for Reflection in Design

Speaker: Kumiyo Nakakoji and Yasuhiro Yamamoto

Cognitive Science Lab Graduate School of Information Science

Nara Institute of Science and Tehcnology, Japan

Abstract: Collective creativity is a term coined to describe the phenomenon where concepts and understanding emerge in people's mind through interacting with knowledge in the world --- with external representations, with other people, or with computer systems. We have been interested in designing computational tools that support collective creativity in early stages of a design task, such as writing, programming, or decision making. We argue that such tools must provide representations that easily "talk back" to the user serving as indicies of thoughts rather than as externalizations of them. In this talk, we first discuss a framework of our approach, and present demonstrations of the ART (Amplifying representational Talkback) system, which uses two dimensional positioning to support the early stages of the writing task, and some of other porototyped systems to illustrate the framework.

Kumiyo Nakakoji, a research fellow at PRESTO, JST, Japan, is an Adjunct Associate Professor for the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Nara Institute of Science and Technology. Her research has been around the topic of Collective Creativity, which involves considerations of culture, communication and creativity in representations, systems and design. She has worked for Software Research Associates, Inc. (Tokyo, Japan) for the last twelve years as a senior researcher at the Software Engineering Laboratory. She received her BS from Osaka University (1986), and MS (1990) and PhD (1993) in Computer Science from University of Colorado at Boulder.

Yasuhiro Yamamoto is a PhD student at Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology. His current research focuses on the use of two-dimensional positioning as a representational medium that supports early stages of a design task, such as writing and video analysis. He received his BS from Kyoto University (1996) and MS from Nara Institute of Science and Technology (1998).