Investigating collaboration in art and technology

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology.With the rapid development in computer technology in recent years, the arrival of digital media and computational tools has opened up new possibilities for creative practice in art, where collaboration between digital art practitioners and computer technologists often happens. The study of interdisciplinary collaboration in art and technology offers great opportunities for investigation of creativity and the role of new technology. This thesis presents an investigation into interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and technologists based on a series of case studies selected from actual art- technology projects. Two analysis techniques were used in this research: context analysis, which provides the breadth of the analysis, and protocol analysis, which provides the depth of the analysis. During the analysis process, two coding schemes, which are the context analysis coding scheme and the protocol analysis coding scheme, were developed, evaluated and refined over a series of case studies. Using the coding schemes, the results of the analysis drawn from different cases are compared and the implications are discussed. The findings provide insights into art- technology collaboration in the creative process, in particular, the features of communication and the role of mediation tools. The outcomes of this thesis are: • The analysis framework, consisting of the context analysis coding scheme and the protocol analysis coding scheme, which has been developed and applied to a series of case studies and has been tested for effectiveness and reliability. • The findings, with the assistance of the analysis framework, provide a better understanding of the nature of the interaction between artists and technologists during a creative process. This includes: o How communication behaviour is distributed between artists and technologists; o What the role of computer tools is during the creative process and how these tools can affect artists’ and technologists’ communication behaviour; o How the collaborative creative process is facilitated by external mediation tools, such as computers, interactive artefacts and physical objects. There are two main contributions of the thesis: first, the analysis framework can serve as a powerful and robust analysis tool for future research in the filed of art- technology collaboration or other related domains. Second, the findings provide a better understanding of the collaborative process, in particular, how mediation tools support creative practice between artists and technologist

Creative idea exploration within the structure of a guiding framework : the card brainstorming game

I present a card brainstorming exercise that transforms a conceptual tangible interaction framework into a tool for creative dialogue and discuss the experiences made in using it. Ten sessions with this card game demonstrate the frameworks' versatility and utility. Observation and participant feedback highlight the value of a provocative question format and of the metaphor of a card game

A Model of Collaboration Network Formation with Heterogenous Skills

Collaboration networks provide a method for examining the highly heterogeneous structure of collaborative communities. However, we still have limited theoretical understanding of how individual heterogeneity relates to network heterogeneity. The model presented here provides a framework linking an individual's skill set to her position in the collaboration network, and the distribution of skills in the population to the structure of the collaboration network as a whole. This model suggests that there is a non-trivial relationship between skills and network position: individuals with a useful combination of skills will have a disproportionate number of links in the network. Indeed, in some cases, an individual's degree is non-monotonic in the number of skills she has--an individual with very few skills may outperform an individual with many. Special cases of the model suggest that the degree distribution of the network will be skewed, even when the distribution of skills is uniform in the population. The degree distribution becomes more skewed as problems become more difficult, leading to a community dominated by a few high-degree superstars. This has striking implications for labor market outcomes in industries where production is largely the result of collaborative effort

Our Museum Special Initiative: An Evaluation

Our Museum: Communities and Museums as Active Partners was a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Special Initiative 2012 – 2016. The overall aim was to influence the museum and gallery sector to:* Place community needs, values and active collaboration at the core of museum and gallery work* Involve communities and individuals in decision-making processes* Ensure that museums and galleries play an effective role in developing community skills and the skills of staff in working with communitiesThis was to be done through facilitation of organisational change in specific museums and galleries already committed to active partnership with communities.Our Museum offered a collaborative learning process through which institutions and communities shared experiences and learned from each other as critical friends. Our Museum took place at a difficult and challenging time for both museums and their community partners. Financial austerity led to major cutbacks in public sector expenditure; a search for new business models; growing competition for funding; and organisational uncertainty and staff volatility. At the same time, the debate at the heart of Our Museum widened and intensified: what should the purpose of longestablished cultural institutions be in the 21st century; how do they maintain relevance and resonance in the contemporary world; how can they best serve their communities; can they, and should they, promote cultural democracy

Physicality and Cooperative Design

CSCW researchers have increasingly come to realize that material work setting and its population of artefacts play a crucial part in coordination of distributed or co-located work. This paper uses the notion of physicality as a basis to understand cooperative work. Using examples from an ongoing fieldwork on cooperative design practices, it provides a conceptual understanding of physicality and shows that material settings and co-worker’s working practices play an important role in understanding physicality of cooperative design

Fostering Inquiry and Creativity in Early Years STEM Education: Policy Recommendations from the <i>Creative Little Scientists</i> Project

Creative Little Scientists was a 30-month (2011-2014) EU/FP7-funded research project focusing on the synergies between early years science and mathematics education and the development of children’s creativity, in response to increasing interest in these areas in European educational policy. Using a variety of methods, including desk research, a teacher survey and classroom-based fieldwork, the research provided insights into whether and how children’s creativity is fostered and appropriate learning outcomes, including children’s interest, emerge. Based on these and ongoing collaboration and dialogue with participants and other stakeholders the project proposed recommendations for policy and teacher education. This paper presents these recommendations and the research on which they were based. Throughout the study, mixed methods were employed, combining quantitative approaches used in surveys of policy and teachers’ views based on a list of factors, alongside qualitative approaches employed in case studies of classroom practice. A strong conceptual framework developed at the start of the project guided data collection and analysis, as well as the presentation of findings and the development of policy recommendations, thus ensuring the latter’s strong and consistent relationship with the relevant theoretical knowledge, the comparative research, analysis of classroom practices and the production of guidelines for teacher education

Collaborative model development increases trust in and use of scientific information in environmental decision-making

While science matters for environmental management, creating science that is credible, salient to decision-makers, and deemed legitimate by stakeholders is challenging. Collaborative modeling is an increasingly-used approach to enable effective science-based decision-making. This work evaluates the modeling process conducted for two hydropower dam licensing negotiations, to explore how differences in the collaborative development of hydrological models affected differences in their use in subsequent decision-making. In one case, the model was developed iteratively through deliberation with stakeholders. Consequently, stakeholders understood the model and its limitations and trusted the model and modelers; the model itself was also better designed to evaluate resource managers’ questions. The collaboratively-developed model became the focal point for subsequent negotiations and enabled creative group problem-solving. Conversely, in the case with less engagement during model development, the model was not used subsequently by decision-makers. These differences are argued to result from trust built during the modeling process, applicability of the model to test real management scenarios, and the broader social context in which the models were used

A web-based teaching/learning environment to support collaborative knowledge construction in design

A web-based application has been developed as part of a recently completed research which proposed a conceptual framework to collect, analyze and compare different design experiences and to construct structured representations of the emerging knowledge in digital architectural design. The paper introduces the theoretical and practical development of this application as a teaching/learning environment which has significantly contributed to the development and testing of the ideas developed throughout the research. Later in the paper, the application of BLIP in two experimental (design) workshops is reported and evaluated according to the extent to which the application facilitates generation, modification and utilization of design knowledge