Workshop Recommendations

• Formal models of creative reasoning.
• Principles that identify parallels between creative disciplines and IT, for example the structure of music and programming languages.
• Creative interpretations of and IT solutions for complex systems, for example sustainability.
• Extend the trajectory introduced by digital and electronic artists in their exhibitions by projects that bring together a researcher in IT with an artist.
• Models of processes in which constraints enhance creativity.
• New computational models of automated creativity.
• Models of the design space that address the problem that the creative process produces huge amounts of data.
• Studies of human creativity and IT, both individual and social.
• Strategies for and evaluation of creativity support tools

• Research projects that ask users and students to specify new kinds of tools and technology. For example, what new kind of tool is needed to help novices and end users design and build ubicomp applications?
• Machine learning and information visualization tools that facilitate the identification of gaps in creativity research, that act as match makers for researcher, find potential common directions for different disciplines.
• Design new tools that build on perceptual research and apply these findings to human-computer interfaces that connect digital models/data to physical/real life.
• Design and collaboration tools that creatively use context data in determining how the tool interacts with others tools and other people.
• Studies of visualization/perceptualization tools (screen-based, immersive, sonic, haptic) and environments in terms of how they afford and prohibit/constrain creativity.
• Studies of how new IT affects the emergence of fundamental and radical ideas (and vice versa). For example study how Google (or similar technologies) has impacted various creative efforts (everyone has a hypothesis about how it impacts their work, but can we tease out which of these factors has broad significance and could be generalized).
• Development and study of mashups as a way of combining information and ideas that can lead to a creative synthesis of information.

• Take a new idea or product in computer science and allow artists to explore the space of new possibilities.
• Take an exhibition of digital/electronic arts and follow the trajectory to a new area of information technology.
• Fund a resident artist to work with a research group.
• Events as a way of doing research: exhibitions, interdisciplinary design studios and workshops that explore a specific need in a short period of time, match-making events in physical and online environments.

• Fostering transdisciplinary communities
• Workshop for people that cross disciplines in their own work
• Workshop for review panel participants to help them be able to better recognize the potential of innovative proposals

• Research methods for studying creativity
• Design guidelines for creativity support tools
• Understanding individual and social creativity
• Directions for computational models of creativity

• Defining a common language
• Workshop to design production-based transdisciplinary workshops
• Workshop to design IT solutions for unsolved problems

1. Improve US global position
2. Make US an attractor for the world's best
3. Beyond manufacturing, beyond services – shift to the creative
4. New models in engineering, IT and design education
5. Attracting the best minds to technology and design

1. New areas of research
2. New models of creativity and innovation
3. Ontologies for creative collaboration
4. New environments/ new spaces that encourage creativity
5. New digital tools that support creativity
6. New prototyping/fabrication tools
7. Graduate student support for creative arts graduate students

1. New educational theories, models, and programs that reward creativity
2. New kinds of graduates - effective participants in the creative economy

1. Economic: improve GNP
2. Adaptive labor force (rapid re-education and re-training), lower unemployment
3. Base economic engine on sustainable, renewable resources (IT and design)

1. Opens up new problem areas
2. New environments
3. New opportunities
4. Better theories
5. Personal efficacy

1. Transformation to more flexible and creative
2. Increase pool of talented graduates

• Solicitation criteria should be inclusive of current creativity research across disciplines.
• Proposals can be descriptive rather than prescriptive, and should include reflection and evaluation.
• Guidelines should allow for interim reviews and/or support "seed funding". Initial funding should be large/long enough for researchers to build up sufficient resources to get to a first round prototype to see what directions are worth following.
• The goals for a project should be allowed to change and deliverables may need to be reviewed.
• Discovery in the process may be documented and presented as deliverable.
• Practice-based research: guidelines should be specific about supporting “makers”.
• Guidelines should be specific about supporting research as synthesis together with analysis.
• Consider a new kind of proposal called a “design proposal” as an alternative kind of funding to the traditional “research proposal”. A “design proposal” is focussed on a need area rather than a specific hypothesis or result. The proposal should combine different perspectives (multi-disciplinary in a way that is focused on ways to understand the need and should explicitly include “outsider” perspectives, e.g., if it is in art-centered project, include technologists, or, if it is a technical design project include artists.
• Educational activity is a key part of the project. Projects should be done with substantial student involvement to create an environment for giving design thinking experience to a wide range of students (different fields). The educational value is independent of the explicit results that emerge from the research.
• Create ties to other forms of student funding (fellowships, research associated with project aspects)

• Reviewers should have some experience with creativity or research in creativity. “Creative” reviewers are more open to creative proposals. Applicants should be encouraged to suggest a list of recommended reviewers. NSF should select empathetic reviewers that are aware of research methods that form part of the proposal as well as reviewers that are familiar with the IT discipline.
• Criteria
  • Will this research improve our understanding of creativity?
  • Does this research help our understanding of the role of creativity in work?
  • Does the research embrace technology and innovation?
  • Does the research use creativity to broaden education in STEM disciplines?
  • Does the research work at the interface of STEM and creativity?
  • Selection criteria based on assessment of human/institutional capacities to learn by doing as the project evolves, rather than by being able to anticipate the results.