Human Information Behavior (HIB) research commonly examines behavior in the context of why information is acquired and how it will be used, but usually at the level of the work or everyday‐life tasks the information will support. HIB has not been examined in detail at the broader contextual level of intellectual purpose (that is, the higher‐order conceptual tasks the information was acquired to support). Examination at this level can enhance holistic understanding of HIB as a “means to an intellectual end” and inform the design of digital information environments that support information interaction for specific intellectual purposes. We investigate information‐based ideation (IBI) as a specific intellectual information acquisition and use context by conducting Critical Incident‐style interviews with 10 game designers, focusing on how they interact with information to generate and develop creative design ideas. Our findings give rise to a framework of their ideation‐focused HIB, which systems designers can leverage to reason about how best to support certain behaviors to drive design ideation. These findings emphasize the importance of intellectual purpose as a driver for acquisition and desired outcome of use.

Applied visualization researchers often work closely with domain collaborators to explore new and useful applications of visualization. The early stages of collaborations are typically time consuming for all stakeholders as researchers piece together an understanding of domain challenges from disparate discussions and meetings. A number of recent projects, however, report on the use of creative visualization-opportunities (CVO) workshops to accelerate the early stages of applied work, eliciting a wealth of requirements in a few days of focused work. Yet, there is no established guidance for how to use such workshops effectively. In this paper, we present the results of a 2-year collaboration in which we analyzed the use of 17 workshops in 10 visualization contexts. Its primary contribution is a framework for CVO workshops that: 1) identifies a process model for using workshops; 2) describes a structure of what happens within effective workshops; 3) recommends 25 actionable guidelines for future workshops; and 4) presents an example workshop and workshop methods. The creation of this framework exemplifies the use of critical reflection to learn about visualization in practice from diverse studies and experience.

Positive emotions can enhance the ability of people to generate original ideas, and its intensity can determine the degree to which people are able to think originally. How to design a technology that can be used to hack into this link between the intensity of positive emotion and creative thinking is, however, still an open problem. To address this we have conceived, developed, and experimentally evaluated a proof-of-concept interactive system that generates believable computational feedback about the originality of a user's own ideas in real-time. This system can manipulate this feedback to make a user's own ideas appear more or less original than people would typically judge them to be, and can also vary the order of this manipulation over time. This has enabled us to test experimentally that: (i) the order in which the positivity and negativity of the feedback is varied can be used to condition people's expectations, which (ii) can be used to later determine an intended intensity a positive emotion that a user experience, and which (iii) subsequently influence the degree to which the user is able to generate original ideas. The findings demonstrate that an interactive system can be designed to determine the type and intensity of an emotional response, in a manner that enhances the people's ability to generate original ideas.

Considerable research has focused on the problems that end users face when programming software, in order to help them overcome their difficulties, but there is little research into the problems that arise in physical computing when end users construct circuits and program them. In an empirical study, we observed end-user developers as they connected a temperature sensor to an Arduino microcontroller and visualized its readings using LEDs. We investigated how many problems participants encountered, the problem locations, and whether they were overcome. We show that most fatal faults were due to incorrect circuit construction, and that often problems were wrongly diagnosed as program bugs. Whereas there are development environments that help end users create and debug software, there is currently little analogous support for physical computing tasks. Our work is a first step towards building appropriate tools that support end-user developers in overcoming obstacles when constructing physical computing artifacts.

Creativity thrives when people experience positive emotions. How to design an interactive system that can effectively make use of this potential is, however, still an unanswered question. In this paper, we propose one approach to this problem that relies on hacking into the cognitive appraisal processes that form part of positive emotions. To demonstrate our approach we have conceived, made, and evaluated a novel interactive system that influences an individual's appraisals of their own idea generation processes by providing real-time and believable feedback about the originality of their ideas. The system can be used to manipulate this feedback to make the user's ideas appear more or less original. This has enabled us to test experimentally the hypothesis that providing more positive feedback, rather than neutral, or more negative feedback than the user is expecting, causes more positive emotion, which in turn causes more creativity during idea generation. The findings demonstrate that an interactive system can be designed to use the function of cognitive appraisal processes in positive emotion to help people to get more out of their own creative capabilities.

Positive emotion can help augment human creativity. To utilize this potential in an interactive system, we propose that such a system should be designed to regulate the emotions that are caused by a creative task. We argue that this can be done by hacking the function of motor expressions in emotion regulation. To this end, we have conceived and made an interactive system that is designed to regulate positive emotion during an idea generation and an insight problem solving task. The system regulates emotion by letting users interact using arm gestures that are designed based on motor expressions, choreographed in a way that enables emotion regulation. Using this interactive system we experimentally test the hypotheses that positive approaching, rather than negative avoiding arm gestures, used to interact with a system, can heighten positive emotion, and augment creativity. The findings demonstrate that an interactive system can be designed to use the function of motor expressions in emotion regulation to help people perform better on certain creative tasks.

There has been little research to develop computing technologies to support the care of people with dementia, in spite of the growing challenges that the condition poses for society. To design such technologies, an existing model of computer-support reflective learning was instantiated with findings from a pre-design study in one residential home. The result was a mobile device running an adapted enterprise social media app to support person-centred care. Evaluations of the device and app in two residential homes revealed that use of the app both motivated and increased different styles of care note recording, but little reflective learning was identified or reported. The results suggest the need for more comprehensive and flexible computer-based support for reflective learning about residents in their care – and new designs of this more comprehensive support are also introduced.

Exploring interactive visualizations of data generated within the domain for which new products and services are to be designed can play a useful role in stimulating ideas that are considered highly appropriate to that domain. We describe a study in which participants in four collaborative design workshops used information visualizations representing electricity consumption data to help generate ideas for new products and services that could utilise the data generated by a smart home. Participants in the workshops appeared to use sensemaking behaviour to develop insights about the domain, which were later used in generating new ideas. Ideas arising from workshops where the stimulus was data visualized with less ambiguity in the visual encoding were judged to be significantly more appropriate than those from workshops where ambiguity in the visual encoding of the data used as stimulus was intentionally increased. We discuss the implications of this with regards to designing future workshop activities.

Creativity workshops have proved effective in drawing out unexpected requirements and giving form to participants' novel ideas. Here, we introduce a new addition to the workshop designer's toolkit: interactive data visualization, used as stimuli to prompt insight and inspire creativity. We first describe a pilot study in which we compare the effectiveness of two different styles of data visualization. Here we found that a less ambiguous style was more effective in supporting idea generation. Following this, we report a case study in which we employ data visualization within a service design workshop, where participants gain insights that are later realized in design ideas.

There is a strong relationship between the mood one is in, and the way one performs creatively. Previous research has shown that this relationship is complex. In this paper we argue that this complexity partly lies in a faulty conceptualization of mood. We will argue that an appraisal tendency perspective on moods will help to further clarify the relationship between mood and creativity. To support this argument we will highlight some inconsistencies in previous research, and use the appraisal tendency perspective on mood to develop predictions that help explain these inconsistencies and develop new directions for mood-creativity research. Future research is required to assess the accuracy of these predictions.

This paper reports a new mobile software app to support creative thinking by carers for people with dementia. The design of the app was informed by both pre-studies that demonstrated the potential of investigating challenging behaviors in non-care domains to improve person-centered care, and a model of creative problem solving adapted to dementia care. The resulting app implements different versions of the Other Worlds creativity technique to generate then reflect on ideas to improve resident care. An evaluation of the app in one residential home revealed that carers were able to use the app as described in the model, and deliver novel care to one resident in the home.

We enhance a user-centered design process with techniques that deliberately promote creativity to identify opportunities for the visualization of data generated by a major energy supplier. Visualization prototypes developed in this way prove effective in a situation whereby data sets are largely unknown and requirements open - enabling successful exploration of possibilities for visualization in Smart Home data analysis. The process gives rise to novel designs and design metaphors including data sculpting. It suggests: that the deliberate use of creativity techniques with data stakeholders is likely to contribute to successful, novel and effective solutions; that being explicit about creativity may contribute to designers developing creative solutions; that using creativity techniques early in the design process may result in a creative approach persisting throughout the process. The work constitutes the first systematic visualization design for a data rich source that will be increasingly important to energy suppliers and consumers as Smart Meter technology is widely deployed. It is novel in explicitly employing creativity techniques at the requirements stage of visualization design and development, paving the way for further use and study of creativity methods in visualization design.

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study within a real-life context that investigates participant behaviour and emergent user roles in asynchronous distributed collaborative idea generation by a defined community of users. In the study, a high-fidelity prototype of an online virtual ideas room was built and used by a Community of Interest consisting of representatives from 10 different voluntary organisations spread across Denmark. The study revealed five user roles, which the authors propose that future asynchronous distributed collaborative idea generation platforms should consider.

This poster reports research to introduce creative problem solving techniques and software to the care for people with dementia in residential homes.

This vision paper frames requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. Its purpose is to enable requirements researchers and practitioners to recruit relevant theories, models, techniques and tools from creative problem solving to understand and support requirements processes more effectively. It uses 4 drivers to motivate the case for requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. It then maps established requirements activities onto one of the longest-established creative problem solving processes, and uses these mappings to locate opportunities for the application of creative problem solving in requirements engineering. The second half of the paper describes selected creativity theories, techniques, software tools and training that can be adopted to improve requirements engineering research and practice. The focus is on support for problem and idea finding - two creative problem solving processes that our investigation revealed are poorly supported in requirements engineering. The paper ends with a research agenda to incorporate creative processes, techniques, training and tools in requirements projects.

In this paper, we describe a creativity workshop that was used in a large research project, called APOSDLE, to generate creative ideas and requirements for a work-integrated learning system. We present an analysis of empirical data collected during and after the workshop. On the basis of this analysis, we conclude that the work-shop was an efficient way of generating ideas for future system development. These ideas, on average, were used at least as much as requirements from other sources in writing use cases, and 18 months after the workshop were seen to have a similar degree of influence on the project to other requirements. We make some observations about the use of more and less creative ideas, and about the techniques used to generate them. We end with suggestions for further work.

There has recently been a trend in requirements engineering towards combining techniques in order to complement the deficiencies of one with the strengths of another. RESCUE is a process that continues this tradition and combines human activity modelling and i* system goal modelling in a concurrent engineering approach to support the generation of more complete and correct use case models and descriptions, and hence better requirements. The process is aimed at developing large socio-technical systems where confidence in the correctness and completeness of use cases, and hence requirements, is important. The RESCUE process has been applied and tested in the specification of requirements for CORA-2, a real and large-scale socio-technical system in which computerised assistance will be provided to air traffic controllers.

It is generally recognized hat choice of languages can have a significant effect on the system development process, particularly in the early stages. In the development of interactive systems, it is essential that all stakeholders are able to participate in a meaningful way. To do this, they must be able to understand representations of key concepts produced by the developers, especially those relating to problems and requirements for the system. Some stakeholders, such as clients and potential users of the system, may be unfamiliar with the languages used by system developers. They may, therefore, find it difficult to understand representations produced using such languages well enough to give useful feedback to the developer. In this article, we identify the ease of understanding representations as a key issue for interactive system development and consider how the notion ease of understanding may be defined in this context. We then discuss: an approach to evaluating software specification languages in terms of properties that may affect the understandability of representations and that may be amenable to objective measurement. Our intention is to use the results of this work to (a) help to classify existing languages in terms of ease of understanding, (b) provide a rational basis for predicting understandability in proposed new languages, and (c) help developers to use current languages in more imaginative ways so that they can produce representations that are easier to understand.

The paper describes efforts that have made to mechanise the requirements engineering process in an industrial avionics domain. The authors' approach is based on an analysis of both the application domain and the task domain. The paper describes the processes they have used for domain analysis, and the tool they have developed to support mechanisation. They give an initial evaluation of the approach and close with a summary of lessons learnt.

Abstract This paper describes our experience in capturing, using a formal specification language, a model of the knowledge‐intensive domain of oceanic air traffic control. This model is intended to form part of the requirements specification for a decision support system for air traffic controllers. We give an overview of the methods we used in analysing the scope of the domain, choosing an appropriate formalism, developing a domain model, and validating the model in various ways. Central to the method was the development of a formal requirements engineering environment which provided automated tools for model validation and maintenance.

The advent of technology which supports the concurrent presentation of information through a range of different media has raised new issues relating to the design of usable systems. While previous work in the areas of both Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and hypermedia system usability can contribute a considerable amount to the development of such guidelines, we believe that the use of multiple output media demands an understanding of particular characteristics and limitations of users' attentional capabilities. This paper presents some initial guidelines for the design of usable multimedia systems. These guidelines are based on empirical findings regarding the nature of human attention derived from the field of experimental psychology. We believe that the provision of such guidelines for multimedia interface design will support designers in achieving the dual goals of maximising a user's flexibility in controlling the presentation of multiple concurrent media, while keeping cognitive load to an acceptable level.

Approaches to providing knowledge-based support for the process of requirements engineering are discussed. The kinds of knowledge commonly used in providing such support are placed within a taxonomy and the approaches of different projects to the definition and representation of each of these kinds of knowledge are considered. Finally, there is a brief review of the ways in which each kind of knowledge is used in various approaches to providing support for commonly recognized stages in the process of requirements engineering. It is concluded that knowledge-based techniques are at present capable of providing significant support for the requirements engineer, but that a considerable amount of work has still to be done before the potential of these techniques can be fully realized.