Improving User Involvement Through Live Collaborative Creation

Creating an artifact - such as writing a book, developing software, or performing a piece of music - is often limited to those with domain-specific experience or training. As a consequence, effectively involving non-expert end users in such creative processes is challenging. This work explores how computational systems can facilitate collaboration, communication, and participation in the context of involving users in the process of creating artifacts while mitigating the challenges inherent to such processes. In particular, the interactive systems presented in this work support live collaborative creation, in which artifact users collaboratively participate in the artifact creation process with creators in real time. In the systems that I have created, I explored liveness, the extent to which the process of creating artifacts and the state of the artifacts are immediately and continuously perceptible, for applications such as programming, writing, music performance, and UI design. Liveness helps preserve natural expressivity, supports real-time communication, and facilitates participation in the creative process. Live collaboration is beneficial for users and creators alike: making the process of creation visible encourages users to engage in the process and better understand the final artifact. Additionally, creators can receive immediate feedback in a continuous, closed loop with users. Through these interactive systems, non-expert participants help create such artifacts as GUI prototypes, software, and musical performances. This dissertation explores three topics: (1) the challenges inherent to collaborative creation in live settings, and computational tools that address them; (2) methods for reducing the barriers of entry to live collaboration; and (3) approaches to preserving liveness in the creative process, affording creators more expressivity in making artifacts and affording users access to information traditionally only available in real-time processes. In this work, I showed that enabling collaborative, expressive, and live interactions in computational systems allow the broader population to take part in various creative practices.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145810/1/snaglee_1.pd

Experiencing Liveness of a Cherished Place in the Home

Liveness, as discussed in HCI and in media studies, focuses on an intriguing and beloved experiential quality that can influence new forms of video applications. We suggest a shift from accounts of liveness in "events" to liveness in ambient media for home décor by designing a system called TransLive that exploits the "magic" of mediatizing the "now" at a distant and cherished place. We present an interview study including four families, who experienced the system for two weeks each in a concept apartment setting. It shows how immediacy and unpredictability provide compelling experiences. Authenticity and engagement, which are previously considered as inherent qualities in live media, instead occur in the context of use. Finally, the experience of transcendence triggered by slow and continuous video streams open up a new design space of liveness. Thus, not only do we take inspiration from liveness theory, but we also need to redefine it