Colloquium 2

Creativity Support Tools: Accelerating Discovery & Innovation
Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland (10/05/07)

I'm tempted to say that 'creativity' is one of the most important values that humans possess but machines don't. In this talk, Dr. Shneiderman focused on tools that can help developing creativity in various areas such as natural science, product design, engineering, music & art, etc.

'Creativity' can be interpreted differently from many distinct points of view such as art's or engineer's, but the progress to achieve the creative mind is not all different. Here are the 8 steps people usually take to get creative ideas.

1. Problem definition 2. Gather information 3. Generate ideas 4. Modeling
5. Feasibility evaluation 6. Decision 7. Communication 8. Implementation

Usually, novices spend more time on the 2nd half, whereas experts spend more time on the 1st half. This implies that as you go deeper into the materials, conceptual ideas can be more important than experimental ideas.

For the last part, Dr. Shneiderman tried to make distinctions between Science 1.0 and Science 2.0.

Science 1.0 Science 2.0
reductionist integrated
controlled experiments case studies
replicability validity
laboratory situated
individual collaboration

As you can see from the descriptions above, Science 2.0 concentrates more on group, inspiration, and situation orientated worked. In my opinion, virtues from Science 2.0 became important because we have already achieved so much with Science 1.0. Therefore, I wouldn't like to say that rather than making transaction between Science 1.0 to 2.0, we should pursue 2.0 in addition to 1.0.

I've tried so hard to be creative in all my life, and this talk motivated me even more. Thanks for Dr. Shneiderman for sharing his thoughts with us.

Last modified 18 October 2007 at 6:57 am by choijd