Interaction design of tools for fostering creativity in the early stages of information design

• Authors: Yasuhiro Yamamoto;Kumiyo Nakakoji
• Venue: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Special issue: Computer support for creativity
• Year: 2005

This paper describes our approach for the design and development of application systems for early stages of information design tasks. We view a computational tool as something that provides materials with which a designer interacts to create a situation that talks back to the designer. The interaction design of a tool, that is, the representations a user can generate and how the user can manipulate them with the tool, influences a user's cognitive processes. The tool's interaction design thus either fosters or hinders creativity in the early stages of information design.Our approach toward the interaction design of a tool for fostering creativity is first to understand the nature of early stages of information design tasks. We discuss four issues in support of the early stages of design based on theories in design and in human-computer interaction: (1) that available means of externalizations influence designers in deciding which courses of actions to take: (2) that designers generate and interact with not only a partial representation of the final artefact but also various external representations: (3) that designers produce externalizations to express a solution as well as to interpret the situations: and (4) that a design task proceeds as a hermeneutic circle--that is. designers proceed with projected meanings of representations and gradually revise and confirm those meanings.The above theoretical account of early stages of information design tasks has led us to identify three interaction design principles for tools for the early stages of information design: interpretation-rich representations, representations with constant grounding and interaction methods for hands-on generation and manipulation of the representations.To illustrate our point, we take ART#001. a tool for the early stages of writing, to apply the interaction design principles and examine how the interaction design of the tool fosters creativity in the early stages of information design. The paper concludes with a discussion of how we generalize the approach and build a framework to design and develop application systems for fostering creativity in the early stages of information design.