Creativity Greenhouse: at-a-distance collaboration and competition over research funding

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a novel mechanism to develop research proposals and distribute funding: Creativity Greenhouse (CG). Building on an established funding sandpit mechanism for co-located participants, communication technologies and structures were designed to support similar activities at-a-distance. Given a particular topic, selected academic participants collaborate during an ideation phase, then form sub-groups around selected ideas to develop research proposals and compete for the available research funding. This paper details the motivations for developing a distributed approach, before describing our iterative design process and trials. We describe an iterative design and evaluation process to support at-a-distance ideation, group formation, and then competitive development of proposals in a shared virtual space, leading to the detailed evaluation of a full-scale CG event that resulted in the distribution of £1.85 Million of funding. This work contributes a novel, fully-developed mechanism to produce research projects, evaluated ‘In the Wild’. Our findings are explored with regards to distinctions and similarities between co-located and distributed events, participant well-being and pastoral care, and the capacity of technologies to mediate complex combinations of cooperative and competitive group work. Through this, we contribute knowledge of how to effectively support research funding events, and also to wider understanding of high-stakes, computer-mediated processes, that involve complex creative and social processes

Creativity Bento Box: a physical resource pack to support interaction in virtual space

The Creativity Bento Box is a physical resource pack, designed to support casual social interaction and break taking in an intensive, computer-mediated social activity. It was developed within the Creativity Greenhouse project, which piloted a mechanism to create research proposals and distribute funding at a distance. This involved facilitated phases of collaboration and competition over multiple days of computer-mediated work, where participants communicate and interact through a virtual world. During the iterative development process, the lack of time for socialising, the intense focus on virtual resources, and a lack of time spent away from the screen were reported as negative issues in feedback from participants. We report on the development of the Creativity Bento Box and how it helped to address these issues. By providing physical resources that contrasted with the properties of the virtual world, it supported people to socialise and take breaks from their primary activity, allowed them to include physical space and artefacts in their interactions, and provoked moves away from the otherwise intense focus on the computer. We reflect on the roles of the Bento Box as a gift, in bridging between physical and virtual contexts, its higher suitability during the earlier phases of ideation and group development, and its perception by participants as something ‘framed’. Through this, we highlight the underexplored potential of using physical, offline resources as a means to solve difficulties in distanced social interactions

Playing Games with Tito:Designing Hybrid Museum Experiences for Critical Play

This article brings together two distinct, but related perspectives on playful museum experiences: Critical play and hybrid design. The article explores the challenges involved in combining these two perspectives, through the design of two hybrid museum experiences that aimed to facilitate critical play with/in the collections of the Museum of Yugoslavia and the highly contested heritage they represent. Based on reflections from the design process as well as feedback from test users, we describe a series of challenges: Challenging the norms of visitor behaviour, challenging the role of the artefact, and challenging the curatorial authority. In conclusion, we outline some possible design strategies to address these challenges