Researchers who build creativity support tools (CSTs) define abstractions and software representations that align with user needs to give users the power to accomplish tasks. However, these specifications also structure and limit how users can and should think, act, and express themselves. Thus, tool designers unavoidably exert power over their users by enacting a “normative ground” through their tools. Drawing on interviews with 11 creative practitioners, tool designers, and CST researchers, we offer a definition of empowerment in the context of creative practice, build a preliminary theory of how power relationships manifest in CSTs, and explain why researchers have had trouble addressing these concepts in the past. We re-examine CST literature through a lens of power and argue that mitigating power imbalances at the level of technical design requires enabling users in both vertical movement along levels of abstraction as well as horizontal movement between tools through interoperable representations. A lens of power is one possible orientation that lets us recognize the methodological shifts required towards building “artistic support tools.” PDF

Whether a programmer with code or a potter with clay, practitioners engage in an ongoing process of working and reasoning with materials. Existing discussions in HCI have provided rich accounts of these practices and processes, which we synthesize into three themes: (1) reciprocal discovery of goals and materials, (2) local knowledge of materials, and (3) annotation for holistic interpretation. We then apply these design principles generatively to the domain of version control to present Quickpose: a version control system for creative coding. In an in-situ, longitudinal study of Quickpose guided by our themes, we collected usage data, version history, and interviews. Our study explored our participants’ material interaction behaviors and the initial promise of our proposed measures for recognizing these behaviors. Quickpose is an exploration of version control as material interaction, using existing discussions to inform domain-specific concepts, measures, and designs for version control systems. Project Website PDF

Recent advancements in lighting design have focused on the visualization and simulation of programmable LED lighting fixtures. However, single-bulb conventional fixtures alongside subtractive color filter gels are still widely used in many art galleries and installations, photography studios, and experimental theatres due to their low cost and existing prevalence in industry. We introduce a novel approach to creating lighting effects for single-bulb fixtures with gels, which enables designers to quickly and inexpensively produce complex, multi-colored effects approximating a target digital image. Our system uses a grid-based approach which cuts small openings in different colored gels and layers them together, forming color combinations when lit. Our work expands the design space of lighting gels with a precise and expressive method, enabling designers to experiment with novel lighting effects through an iterative personal fabrication process. Online Link PDF

We present an early stage prototype of an acoustic labeling system using Velcro, a two-sided household adhesive product. We create labels by varying the shape of Velcro pieces to produce distinct sounds when the two sides are separated, and we use an automatic audio classification pipeline to detect and classify small sets of labels. We evaluate our classifier on four sets of three simple Velcro labels, present a demo highlighting potential use cases of these labels, and discuss future applications. Online Link PDF