14th Annual Focus on Creative Inquiry Poster Forum Program

The Focus on Creative Inquiry (FoCI) Poster Forum is an annual event in which Creative Inquiry (CI) teams can present their research and project accomplishments through posters and interactive displays. It is a celebration of student and mentor collaborations and accomplishments! Teams take this opportunity to develop and hone their communication skills

Curiosity and experience design: developing the desire to know and explore in ways that are sociable, embodied and playful

Curiosity, as a strong motivator for exploration and discovery, has long been an underexplored but important emotional response in relation to technology. This research considers that it has great potential to improve many aspects of the user experience, especially in today’s screen-saturated context. However, engaging curiosity by novelty and uncertainty may exhaust attentional strength and challenge usability. Thus, the purpose of this research is to find ways to foster the human trait of curiosity and avoid its negative effects. To gain an in-depth understanding of curiosity, the first chapter reviews cross-disciplinary literature to expand its role in improving user experience. This ranges from serving as an attention grabber to including the values that contribute to human survival, thriving, emotional resilience, and personal development. The second chapter identifies problems in the current curiosity-provoking design methods. The chapter also emphasises design for supporting active curiosity and avoiding the creation of purely novel stimuli. This approach is to encourage active curiosity to develop. To this end, the research proceeds to conduct observational studies at a museum to broaden our understanding of factors that influence people’s curiosity and exploration within a screen-mediated context. Based on these observations, I identified that there are three conceptual elements: sociability, embodiment, and playfulness. Through theoretical discussion and reflection upon the design examples, subsequent three chapters explore the relationship between curiosity and each conceptual element. The chapters also suggest several design approaches that embrace curiosity in relation to its social, embodied, and playful nature. These include creating a sense of co-curiosity, allowing the use of covert and overt curiosity-satisfying strategies, increasing bodily exploration affordances of the screen for linking curiosity with embodiment, using metaphors of the body-screen relationship, and developing possibilities and adding enchanting effects for eliciting playfulness to enrich curiosity. In essence, this research enhances our understanding of the user experience from the perspective of curiosity, and these design suggestions also help to embrace users’ active curiosity in developing sociable, embodied, and playful well-being in the age of ubiquitous screens

Acute Exercise and Creativity: Embodied Cognition Approaches

This dissertation manuscript is the culmination of three years of research examining several unique, exercise-induced mechanisms underlying creativity. This collection of work addresses historical and current empirical concepts of creativity in a narrative review, providing recommendations for future research. Several reviews follow this introduction, highlighting the proposed effects of exercise on creativity, putative mechanisms for creativity, and the effects of exercise and embodied manipulations on creative behavior. Multiple experiments utilizing moderate-intensity exercise as a theoretical stimulus for higher-order cognitions were conducted to investigate associations between exercise and creativity, which lead to the final dissertation experiment. The dissertation experiment was the first to provide statistically significant evidence for acute, moderate-intensity treadmill exercise coupled with anagram problem-solving to prime subsequent RAT completion compared to a non-exercise, priming only condition. We emphasize that the additive effects of exercise plus priming may be a viable strategy for enhancing verbal convergent creativity. Future research is warranted to explore a variety of priming effects on the relationship between exercise, embodied interventions, and creativityThis dissertation manuscript is the culmination of three years of research examining several unique, exercise-induced mechanisms underlying creativity. This collection of work addresses historical and current empirical concepts of creativity in a narrative review, providing recommendations for future research. Several reviews follow this introduction, highlighting the proposed effects of exercise on creativity, putative mechanisms for creativity, and the effects of exercise and embodied manipulations on creative behavior. Multiple experiments utilizing moderate-intensity exercise as a theoretical stimulus for higher-order cognitions were conducted to investigate associations between exercise and creativity, which lead to the final dissertation experiment. The dissertation experiment was the first to provide statistically significant evidence for acute, moderate-intensity treadmill exercise coupled with anagram problem-solving to prime subsequent RAT completion compared to a non-exercise, priming only condition. We emphasize that the additive effects of exercise plus priming may be a viable strategy for enhancing verbal convergent creativity. Future research is warranted to explore a variety of priming effects on the relationship between exercise, embodied interventions, and creativit

If I Had a Hammer: An Archeology of Tactical Media From the Hootenanny to the People\u27s Microphone

American folk music gatekeepers have been rightfully critiqued for positing problematic naturalizations of authenticity. Yet, there are underexplored thinkers and artists across the history of folk music whose relationship to media is more complicated. By drawing on the field of media archeology, this dissertation explores the various diagrams and models of communication that can be pulled from the long American folk revival. Media archeology as described by such thinkers as Jussi Parikka and Siegfried Zielinski is not a conventionally linear means of narrating media history; media archeology rather seeks to uncover forgotten and all-but-lost potentialities within our historical media ecologies. In this way, drawing also on the work of Friedrich Kittler, Marshall McLuhan, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I explore the subterranean but vivid discourse on technology offered by several key players in American folk music history. I begin by closely reading the work, writings, and eclectic projects of Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger. Lomax’s anthropological and folkloristic research was grounded in a myriad of both analogue and digital media; he pioneered the use of sound-recording technology in the field, used IBM mainframes to analyze musicological data in the sixties, and even experimented with personal computers and multimedia software in the eighties and nineties. I probe Lomax’s writings to find an anomalous and productive conception of the digital. Second, I look at Pete Seeger’s complicated relationship to McLuhan; despite his problems with the Torontonian superstar, Seeger’s own thought works towards a similarly medium-specific understanding of resistance. Chapter 3 considers Steve Jobs’s and Apple’s mobilization of Bob Dylan’s work and star image. Although Apple’s effacement of the machine has roots in Dylan’s own artistic lineage (via Romanticism), we can also find a post-humanist Dylan—one interested in noise, machines, and parasites. The final chapter explores through-lines between the “Hootenanny” parties held by Woody Guthrie and his friends in the early 1940s and more recent mobile, music-making iPhone apps, with a final stop at the Occupy movement’s “People’s Microphone.” These exploratory case studies bring to light a set of connections and convergences between digital history, folk music, and critical theory

Intrinsic Motivation in Computational Creativity Applied to Videogames

PhD thesisComputational creativity (CC) seeks to endow artificial systems with creativity. Although human creativity is known to be substantially driven by intrinsic motivation (IM), most CC systems are extrinsically motivated. This restricts their actual and perceived creativity and autonomy, and consequently their benefit to people. In this thesis, we demonstrate, via theoretical arguments and through applications in videogame AI, that computational intrinsic reward and models of IM can advance core CC goals. We introduce a definition of IM to contextualise related work. Via two systematic reviews, we develop typologies of the benefits and applications of intrinsic reward and IM models in CC and game AI. Our reviews highlight that related work is limited to few reward types and motivations, and we thus investigate the usage of empowerment, a little studied, information-theoretic intrinsic reward, in two novel models applied to game AI. We define coupled empowerment maximisation (CEM), a social IM model, to enable general co-creative agents that support or challenge their partner through emergent behaviours. Via two qualitative, observational vignette studies on a custom-made videogame, we explore CEM’s ability to drive general and believable companion and adversary non-player characters which respond creatively to changes in their abilities and the game world. We moreover propose to leverage intrinsic reward to estimate people’s experience of interactive artefacts in an autonomous fashion. We instantiate this proposal in empowerment-based player experience prediction (EBPXP) and apply it to videogame procedural content generation. By analysing think-aloud data from an experiential vignette study on a dedicated game, we identify several experiences that EBPXP could predict. Our typologies serve as inspiration and reference for CC and game AI researchers to harness the benefits of IM in their work. Our new models can increase the generality, autonomy and creativity of next-generation videogame AI, and of CC systems in other domains

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 3: People

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 3 includes papers from People track of the conference

Anticipating and Preparing for Emerging Skills and Jobs

This open access book analyzes the main drivers that are influencing the dramatic evolution of work in Asia and the Pacific and identifies the implications for education and training in the region. It also assesses how education and training philosophies, curricula, and pedagogy can be reshaped to produce workers with the skills required to meet the emerging demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The book’s 40 articles cover a wide range of topics and reflect the diverse perspectives of the eminent policy makers, practitioners, and researchers who authored them. To maximize its potential impact, this Springer-Asian Development Bank co-publication has been made available as open access

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs