Multiscale design is the widely practiced use of space and scale to visually explore and articulate relationships. Free-form web curation (FFWC) is an approach to supporting multiscale design, involving creative strategies of collecting content, assembling it to juxtapose and organize, sketching, writing, shifting perspective to navigate, and exhibiting to share and collaborate. Our long term goal is to support design students with automatic, on demand feedback.

This proposed research investigates new media and interaction techniques to address creativity challenges facing design teams. I propose role-based layers within zoomable spaces, as a novel technique for reducing collaborative fixation, while maintaining shared awareness and shared visual context. My research will enable design teams to create layered, multiscale design curation spaces which can modulate individual and collaborative creative processes.

We investigate new media to improve how teams of students create and organize artifacts as they perform design. Some design artifacts are readymade-e.g., prior work, reference images, code framework repositories-while others are self-made-e.g., storyboards, mock ups, prototypes, and user study reports. We studied how computer science students use the medium of free-form web curation to collect, assemble, and report on their team-based design projects. From our mixed qualitative methods analysis, we found that the use of space and scale was central to their engagement in creative processes of communication and contextualization.

Our objective is to explore distributed forms of creativity that arise in play to help guide and foster supportive research, game design, and technology. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers, game designers, and others to examine theories of creativity and play, game design practices, methods for studying creativity in play, and creative play experiences. Participants will present work, video prototype, discuss topics, and contribute to outcomes.

We derive a theory of multiscale design through a study of a landscape architecture studio classroom. We find that processes of designing, to meet a site's situated needs, involve creating and connecting representations across levels, such as overview and detail. We introduce multiscale design theory, which works to understand how designers explore, juxtapose, and synthesize relationships across levels of scale. We identify three design strategies landscape architecture students use to work with scale: multiply, map, and shift perspective. We combine these strategies with prior literature, across fields, to initiate a theory of multiscale design.

In recent years, online education's reach and scale have increased through new platforms for large and small online courses. However, these platforms often rely on impoverished modalities, which provide limited support for participation in social learning experiences. We present Collaborative Live Media Curation (CLMC), a new medium for sharing context and participation in online learning. CLMC involves collaborative, synchronous collection, creation, and assemblage of web media, including images, text, video, and sketch. CLMC integrates live media including streaming video, screenshares, audio, and text chat. We deploy and study LiveMâché, a CLMC technology probe, in four situated online learning contexts. We discovered student and instructor strategies for sharing context and participating including creating curations in advance, sketching to illustrate and gesture, real-time transformations, sharing perspective, and assembling live streams. We develop implications through live experience patterns, which describe how spatial and computing structures support social activities.

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have become a critical tools for the coordination of activist movements and demonstrations. Additionally, live streaming platforms like Periscope have started to emerge as modalities for reporting on and remotely experiencing activist activities. In this design fiction, we present LiveDissent, a fictional media platform that leverages both established and emerging technologies to support remote participation in activist demonstrations. These technologies include mobile live streaming, telepresence robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, and digitally augmented picket signs. LiveDissent brings these technologies together into an aggregated platform for remotely watching and participating in demonstrations. We discuss a planned in the wild study at an upcoming demonstration, through which we will explore the design and implications of social media and telepresence for participation in activism. Finally, our authors' statement connects to related prior work and explores potential research and ethics questions.

On Reddit, users from tens of thousands of communities create and promote internet content, including pictures, videos, news, memes, and creative writing. However, like most social media feeds, subscribing to a very small subset of available content creates filter bubbles. These bubbles, while created unintentionally, skew perceptions of reality. This phenomena provides an impetus for researchers to design techniques breaking out of filter bubbles. Virtual reality provides opportunities for new environments that contextualize social media among multiple perspectives. We present one solution to the filter bubble problem: Blue Link City, which enables contextualized exploration of Reddit.

We synthesize principles across art, design, writing, and psychology to articulate strategies of free-form web curation, for stimulating students' creative engagement with prior work, in performance of ideation tasks. We manifest the strategies in an interactive system and pedagogy. Free-form web curation is a form of new media--designed to enable users to conceptualize and create new contexts--in which they discover, interpret, and represent relationships, by composing readymade and self-made content elements. The strategies are Collect, Assemble, Shift Perspective, Sketch, Write, and Exhibit. We conducted a field study involving 1247 students over 4 semesters. We connect visual, quantitative, and experiential data to show how students engage with prior work through the free-form web curation strategies, system, and pedagogy. We develop implications for design of web curation systems and education. We coalesce a theory of free-form web curation, based on the strategies, emphasizing the roles of space and context.

Web curation involves choosing, organizing, and commenting on content. Popular web curation apps-- e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest-- provide linear feeds that show people the latest content, but provide little support for articulating relationships among content elements. The new medium of free-form web curation enables multimedia elements to be spontaneously gathered from the web, written about, sketched amidst, manipulated, and visually assembled in a continuous space. Through free-form web curation, content is collected, interpreted, and arranged, creating context. We conducted a field study of 1581 students in 6 courses, spanning diverse fields. We derive patterns of free-form curation through a visual grounded theory analysis of the resulting dataset of 4426 curations. From the observed range of invocations of the patterns in the performance of ideation tasks, we conclude that free-form is valuable as a new medium of web curation in how it supports creative visual thinking.

We extend the Twitter interface to stimulate exploratory browsing of social media and develop a creative cognition method to establish its efficacy. Exploratory browsing is a creative process in which users seek and traverse diverse and novel information as they investigate a conceptual space. The TweetBubble browser extension extends Twitter to enable expansion of social media associations@usernames and #hashtags-in-context, without overwriting initial content. We build on a prior metadata type system, developing new presentation semantics, which enable an integrated look and feel consistent with Twitter.

We investigate how presentation in a free-form medium stimulates free-form thinking and discussion in the classroom. Most classroom presentations utilize slideware (e.g. PowerPoint). Yet, slides add intrusive segregations that obstruct the flow of information. In contrast, in a free-form medium of presentation, content is not separated into rigid slide compartments. Instead, it is visually arranged and transformed in a continuous space.

Evaluating creativity support environments is challenging. Some approaches address people’s experiences of creativity. The present method measures creativity, across conditions, in the products that people make. This research introducesinformation-based ideation(IBI), a paradigm for investigating open-ended tasks and activities in which users develop new ideas. IBI tasks span imagining, planning, and reflecting on a weekend, vacation, outfit, makeover, paper, internship, thesis, design, campaign, crisis response, career, or invention. What products do people create through engagement in IBI?Curationof digital media incorporates conceptualization, finding and choosing information objects, annotation, and synthesis. Through engagement in IBI tasks, people create curation products. This article formulates a quantitative methodology for evaluating IBI support tools, building on prior creative cognition research in engineering design to derive a battery ofideation metrics of curation. Elemental ideation metricsevaluate creativity within curated found objects.Holistic ideation metricsevaluate how a curation puts elements together. IBI support environments are characterized by their underlying medium of curation. Curation media include lists, such as listicles, and grids, such as the boards of Pinterest. An in-depth case study investigatesinformation composition, an art-based medium representing a curation as a freeform visual semantic connected whole. We raise two creative cognition challenges for IBI. One challenge is overcoming fixation—for instance, when a person gets stuck in a counterproductive mental set. The other challenge is to bridge information visualization’ssynthesis gap, by providing support for connecting findings. To address the challenges, we developmixed-initiative information composition(MI2C), integrating human curation of information composition with automated agents of information retrieval and visualization. We hypothesize that MI2C generatesprovocative stimulithat help users overcome fixation to become more creative on IBI tasks. We hypothesize that MI2C’s integration of curation and visualization bridges the synthesis gap to help users become more creative. To investigate these hypotheses, we apply ideation metrics of curation to interpret results from experiments with 44 and 49 participants.

Reflection, interpretation, and curation play key roles in learning, creativity, and problem solving. Reflection means looking back and forward among building blocks constituting a space of ideas, contextualizing with processes including tasks, activities, and one's internal thinking and meditating, and deriving new understandings, known as interpretations. Curation, in the digital age, means searching, gathering, collecting, organizing, designing, reflecting on, and interpreting information.

Collecting, organizing, and thinking about diverse information resources is the keystone of meaningful digital information experiences, from research to education to leisure. Metadata semantics are crucial for organizing collections, yet their structural diversity exacerbates problems of obtaining and manipulating them, strewing end users and application developers amidst the shadows of a proverbial tower of Babel. We introduce meta-metadata, a language and software architecture addressing a metadata semantics lifecycle: (1) data structures for representation of metadata in programs; (2) metadata extraction from information resources; (3) semantic actions that connect metadata to collection representation applications; and (4) rules for presentation to users. The language enables power users to author metadata semantics wrappers that generalize template-based information sources. The architecture supports development of independent collection representation applications that reuse wrappers. The initial meta-metadata repository of information source wrappers includes Google, Flickr, Yahoo, IMDb, Wikipedia, and the ACM Portal. Case studies validate the approach.