Individual, unaided human abilities are constrained. Media have helped us to transcend boundaries in thinking, working, learning, and collaborating by supporting distributed intelligence. Wireless and mobile technologies provide new opportunities for empowering humans, but not without potential pitfalls. We explore these opportunities and pitfalls from a lifelong-learning perspective and discuss how wireless and mobile technologies can influence and change conceptual frameworks such as the relationship between planning and situated action, context awareness, human attention, distances in collaborative design activities, and the trade-off between tools for living and tools for learning. The impact of wireless and mobile technologies is illustrated with our research projects, which focus on moving “computing off the desktop ” by “going small, large, and everywhere. ” Specific examples include human-centered public transportation systems, collaborative design, and information sharing with smart physical objects.

In a world that is not predictable, improvisation and evolution are more than a luxury: they are a necessity. The challenge of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of making it an opportunity for more creative and more sustainable solutions. User-centered and participatory design approaches have focused primarily on activities taking place at design time. These approaches have not given enough emphasis and they have provided few mechanisms to support systems as living entities that can evolve over time. Metadesign is a unique design approach concerned with opening up solution spaces rather than complete solutions (hence the prefix meta-), and aimed at creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. This approach extends the traditional notion of design beyond the original development of a system to include co-adaptive processes between users and systems that enable the users to act as designers in personally meaningful activities and be creative.

The first decade of the World Wide Web predominantly enforced a clear separation between designers and consumers. New technological developments, such as the cyberinfrastructure and Web 2.0 architectures, have emerged to support a participatory Web and social computing. These developments are the foundations for a fundamental shift from consumer cultures (specialized in producing finished goods to be consumed passively) to cultures of participation (in which all people are provided with the means to participate actively in personally meaningful activities). End-user development and meta-design provide foundations for this fundamental transformation. They explore and support new approaches for the design, adoption, appropriation, adaptation, evolution, and sharing of artifacts by all participating stakeholders. They take into account that cultures of participation are not dictated by technology alone: they are the result of incremental shifts in human behavior and social organizations. The design, development, and assessment of five particular applications that contributed to the development of our theoretical framework are described and discussed.

com There has been much recent interest in the development of tools to foster remote collaboration and shared creative work. An open question is: what are the guidelines for this process? What are the key socio-technical preconditions required for a geographically distributed group to collaborate effectively on creative work, and are they different from the conditions of a decade or two ago? In an attempt to answer these questions, we conducted empirical studies of two seemingly very different online communities, both requiring effective collaboration and creative work: an international collaboration of astrophysicists studying supernovae to learn more about the expansion rate of the universe, and a group of children, ages 8-15, from different parts of the world, creating and sharing animated stories and video games on the Scratch online community developed at MIT. Both groups produced creative technical work jointly and were considered successful in their communities. Data included the analysis of thousands of lines from chat and comment logs over a period of several months, and interviews with community members. We discovered some surprising commonalities and some intriguing possibilities, and suggest guidelines for successful creative collaborations. Specifically, systems that support social creativity must facilitate sharing and play, and their design must consider the effects of repurposing, augmentation and behavior adaptation. Author Keywords Collective creativity, social creativity, computer-supported cooperative work, computer-mediated communication. ACM Classification Keywords H5.3. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Group and organization interfaces.

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Although creative individuals are often thought of as working in isolation, much of our intelligence and creativity results from interaction with tools and artifacts and from collaborating with other individuals [Csikszentmihalyi, 1996]. Many traditional approaches to creativity, however, have disregarded the importance of social and material surroundings. A richer framework would enable software development, interaction design, and information content researchers and managers to understand the opportunities, challenges and principles of social creativity Social Creativity. As shown by movie directors, champions of sports teams, leading scientists and influential politicians, an individual’s skills and experience can make a huge difference. Individual and social creativity can and need to complement each other. In complex design problems such as urban planning, for example, the difference in knowledge, expertise, and perspectives that exist among individuals provides the ground to collaborate toward more creative and sustainable solutions [Arias et al., 2000]. The same is true for scientific collaboratories [Kouzes et al., 1996], in which computer scientists work with domain specialists to accelerate knowledge development and dissemination, and for creative practices such as art and technology

Abstract — We present a computational model of creative design based on collaborative interactive genetic algorithms. We test our model on floorplanning. We guide the evolution of floorplans based on subjective and objective criteria. The subjective criteria consists of designers picking the floorplan they like the best from a population of floorplans, and the objective criteria consists of coded architectural guidelines. We support collaboration by allowing individual designers to view each others ’ designs during the evolutionary process and the sharing of designs via case injection. This methodology supports team design, and reflects the view of creativity that collaboration accounts for much of our intelligence and creativity. We present a description of the model and a comparative study of floorplans created individually versus collaboratively. Our results show that floorplans created collaboratively were considered to be more “revolutionary ” and “original ” than those created individually. I.

Group brainstorming, or collaboratively generating ideas through idea sharing, demands diverse contributions to spark more ideas and improve creativity. One approach to supporting group brainstorming is to introduce conceptual diversity. In this study, we evaluate the effects of two sources of diversity on group brainstorming: cultural differences internal to multicultural groups and pictures related to the conversation retrieved by a computer agent. The pictures generally enhanced performance as measured by both originality and diversity of ideas. The pictures also helped to convert cultural diversity into a creative outcome, the diversity of ideas generated. We argue that with appropriate technology mediation, cultural diversity may be used strategically to enhance task outcomes. Author Keywords Intercultural collaboration, group brainstorming, group

This interactive session will consider the forms of deep and engaged learning of

The most important and interesting of the computing challenges we are facing are those that involve the problems and opportunities afforded by massive decentralization and disintermediation. The problems and opportunities arise in domains where controlled action is necessary, but centralized control is infeasible. These are the traditional domains of distributed problem solving and multiagent systems, and they include information systems for healthcare, commerce, energy distribution, and traffic control. However, the current incarnations of these domains are scaled well beyond anything envisioned originally. Nevertheless, traditional techniques derived from artificial intelligence are still mostly appropriate. Specifically, representation, reasoning, learning, planning, and situated semantics�when distributed computationally and extended to multiple loci of intelligence�will all be part of potential solutions. They will affect not only the ways systems will be implemented and executed in the future, but also the ways they will be designed, developed, and deployed. This paper focuses on the domains and their challenges. It describes the trends that are observable in our research technologies and shows how they can be used to confront the challenges. It is hoped that new avenues of research will be revealed from following the trends.