Collaboration with local and distant artists to find out their needs and wishes

Collaboration with local and distant artists to find out their needs and wishes here.

To get a better understanding of what the actual needs in a collaborative creative process, namely an artistic collaboration across distance, are, we are collaborating with artists locally and over the internet. These (New Media) artists already have experience in creative collaborations over the internet and thus are able to help us in developing tools that support creative distance collaborations.

As a starting point, we asked them what they need for collaborating, what they are currently using, and how (a new generation of) wikis could play into this.

The results were rather disappointing for us. While the wiki-metaphor might be interesting, the format of a webpage is in now way helpful. If at all, a wiki could act as meta-level, where the work is discussed, explained, planned. However, the common opinion was that the collaboration works through the content, not meta-levels. If additional communication was needed, email was preferred over another special system – people know how to use their mail, how to attach any kind of media, and they are sure that the message receives its audience as soon as possibble.

Even when the artists wouldn't use our wiki we wanted to know how important certain aspects about/functions of a collaborative creative tool are to them:

CHARACTERISTIC	ARTISTS	WE	subjective WEB 2.0
annotation	unimportant	high priority	hot
ease of use	very important	med priority	hot
speed	important	low priority	medium
directness	rather unimportant	high priority	very hot
availability	very important	low priority	hot
userbase	rather unimportant	high priority	very hot
privacy	important	low priority	medium
access control	very important	med priority	medium

Last modified 18 January 2008 at 4:02 pm by hodie