The artist as a solitary genius does not reflect the reality of art-making. To enable art-making, artists are supported by many other people—subcontractors, collaborators, etc.—who collectively form an Artist’s Support Network. Through an interview of 14 artists, we map the space of relationship types, provided support, interactions, failures, and successes of human support relationships. Moreover, we identified the patterns by which these aspects relate to each other in different support relationships. As technologically-driven Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) emerge to augment and automate portions of the artist’s support network, the detail of these interactions becomes critical. Existing sites of collaboration in support networks invariably shape artists’ expectations. How a CST fits within existing interaction expectations will shape the design, the artist’s understanding, and ultimately, acceptance. With this lens, we reflect on how a CST’s design–and in particular, those support collaboration and AI-driven variants–will mesh with the artist’s support network.

With the development of end-user fabrication technology, plotters have become increasingly accessible and attractive to a broader community. Since their invention, these 3-axis CNC machines have been connecting digital and analog creation. Plotters have great potential as a tool to bridge the digital-physical divide, allowing learners from a variety of backgrounds to gain immediate satisfaction from their programming by translating digital output into physical artifacts. In addition, due to their roots in art, plotters may be more inviting to students from artistic backgrounds new to programming. In this studio, we investigate plotters’ potential in introducing creative programming in collaborative learning environments. By introducing collaborative creative programming through the lens of plotters, we explore solutions to challenges in programming education, collaborative programming, and personal fabrication.

Despite the ubiquity of communicative visualizations, specifying communicative intent during design is ad hoc. Whether we are selecting from a set of visualizations, commissioning someone to produce them, or creating them ourselves, an effective way of specifying intent can help guide this process. Ideally, we would have a concise and shared specification language. In previous work, we have argued that communicative intents can be viewed as a learning/assessment problem (i.e., what should the reader learn and what test should they do well on). Learning-based specification formats are linked (e.g., assessments are derived from objectives) but some may more effectively specify communicative intent. Through a large-scale experiment, we studied three specification types: learning objectives, insights, and assessments. Participants, guided by one of these specifications, rated their preferences for a set of visualization designs. Then, we evaluated the set of visualization designs to assess which specification led participants to prefer the most effective visualizations. We find that while all specification types have benefits over no-specification, each format has its own advantages. Our results show that learning objective-based specifications helped participants the most in visualization selection. We also identify situations in which specifications may be insufficient and assessments are vital.

Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) have become an integral part of artistic creation. The range of CST technologies is broad—from fabricators to generative algorithms to robots. The interaction approaches for CSTs are accordingly broad. CSTs combine specific technologies and interaction types to serve a spectrum of roles and users. In this work, we tackle a comprehensive understanding of how the intersections of users, roles, interactions, and technologies form a design space for CSTs. We accomplish this by reviewing 111 art-creation CSTs from HCI and computing research and analyzing how diverse aspects of CSTs relate to each other. Our findings identify patterns for designing CSTs, which can give guidance to future CST designers. We also highlight under-explored types of CSTs within the HCI community, providing future directions that CST researchers can pursue given the current trajectory of technological advancement. This work contributes an integrating perspective to understand the landscape of art-creation CSTs.

Punch needle embroidery is a unique type of embroidery that uses loops of threads to create designs. Technology for punch needle embroidery ranges from popular handheld manual tools to high-cost industrial tufting machines. Computer-controlled punch needle fabrication tools remain out-of-reach for most practitioners. In this work, we describe how a low-cost X-Y plotter can be repurposed to support punch needle embroidery fabrication. By adding easy-to-make physical accessories coupled with a novel software toolkit, we support the production of delicate and precise punch needle embroideries with minimal manual labor. After examining and evaluating the potential and challenges of converting X-Y plotters into punch needle embroidery fabricators, we propose design and fabrication guidelines that are specific to plotter-based punch needle embroideries. We demonstrate how this novel fabrication approach enables the production of a wide range of artifacts and textures.

Shifts in information visualization practice are forcing a reconsideration of how infovis is taught. Traditional curricula that focused on conveying research-derived knowledge are slowly integrating design thinking as a key learning objective. In part, this is motivated by the realization that infovis is a wicked design problem, requiring a different kind of design work. In this paper we describe, VizItCards, a card-driven workshop developed for our graduate infovis class. The workshop is intended to provide practice with good design techniques and to simultaneously reinforce key concepts. VizItCards relies on principles of collaborative-learning and research on parallel design to generate positive collaborations and high-quality designs. From our experience of simulating a realistic design scenario in a classroom setting, we find that our students were able to meet key learning objectives and their design performance improved during the class. We describe variants of the workshop, discussing which techniques we think match to which learning goals.