Zoom: https://illinois.zoom.us/j/86356688772?pwd=1BvvZfKG4G6LUCUjNuaiUP9ajxRbRM.1
Abstract:
From programmers to writers to painters, creative practitioners engage in complex, individualized, and evolving workflows. Practitioners create not only code, manuscripts, and canvases but also create the process of making them: the ways and whys of how we work. How do our software tools shape the motivations, decisions, and goals of creative process? In this talk, I share how the Process, Interaction, and Creativity Lab (PICL) designs systems for creative work through a series of projects that highlight process itself. I will describe (1) studies to understand process across divergent domains, (2) novel interface designs that transform ephemeral processes into materials for reflection, and (3) how focusing on process can shape the future of emerging technologies like generative AI and automated synthetic biology. Our work has enabled student reflection and remote collaboration during the COVID19 pandemic, surfaces the problem-solving process itself for students and instructors to debug how they debug, and demonstrated how seemingly inconsequential design choices of AI systems influence users’ attitudes about their quality, trustworthiness, and humanness. By studying creativity through the lens of process, PICL draws insights from diverse contexts to build a future in which we design technologies that not only expand what we create, but also allow us to intentionally shape how and why we create.
Bio:
Sarah Sterman is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she leads the Process, Interaction, and Creativity Lab (PICL). PICL researches creative process and builds novel computational creativity support tools across domains including programming, writing, education, and design. Sarah draws on methods from computer science and design to expand the communities and values that software tools support and develop new ways of working with emerging technologies. Her work has received Best Paper Awards at ACM CHI and ACM Creativity & Cognition, and is supported by a Google Academic Research Award and the National Science Foundation. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MS in Computer Science and BS in Product Design from Stanford University.
Faculty Host: Brian Bailey
Meeting ID: 863 5668 8772
Password: csillinois