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Considerations for Electronic Idea-Creation Tools |
I. M. Verstijnen & R. Stuyver |
C. C. van Leeuwen & R. Hamel |
Dept of Industrial Design Engineering |
Dept of Psychology |
ABSTRACT Recent research into the psychology of paper-and-pencil sketching reveals two ongoing interacting processes during a creative process. The first of these processes can easily be performed in mental imagery and hence is not supported by sketching, the second is hard to perform before the mental eye, and hence is supported by sketching. It is argued that, in order to be intuitive, electronic sketching tools must meet the requirements of firstly not impeding the first of the two processes and secondly support and enhance the second process. Keywords CAD-tools, paper & pencil sketching, creativity, discovery INTRODUCTION Although celebrated inventors, like Kekulé and Einstein, claim they made their discoveries before their mental eye, industrial design engineers and artists generally get frustrated when any form of externalisation of their mental images is withheld. Psychological research in the field of visual imagery gives ambiguous answers to the question whether discoveries can be made in imagery only. On one hand research of Finke and Slayton [2] reveals results in agreement with the claim of the celebrated individuals, on the other hand the results of Chambers and Reisberg [1] argue for a major benefit by making mental images available for visual perception. THEORY We hypothesized that these opposing results could be reconciled if these two lines of research had addressed two different mental processes. We speculated [5,6] that Finke's [2] mental imagery paradigm contains basically a spatial task of moving elements around in space, and synthesizing these elements into a larger whole. Such a task can easily be performed before the mental eye. In this task only the alignment of the elements with respect to each other is changed. The elements themselves remain intact and therefore keep having the same identity as before the mental operation. This latter aspect of the task is crucially different from the tasks practised in the experiments of Chambers and Reisberg [1] and also Reed and Johnsen[3]. In their paradigms, the constituent elements of a mental image had to be restructured to turn into a fundamentally new identity with fundamentally new characteristics. Their experiments compelled the subjects to abandon their initial interpretation of the elements of an image, in favor of a new unanticipated interpretation. Then, in this new interpretation, they had to discover new unanticipated information. In order for this to take place, restructuring of the elements and formation of new unanticipated elements had to occur in mental imagery. We speculated [5] that this latter process of discovery through restructuring is extremely difficult in mental imagery. If two different processes exist of which one is easy to perform in imagery whereas the other is considerably difficult, differential benefit values for externalization of images through paper-and-pencil sketching can be expected. If a mental operation is easy, as in a synthesis task, little or no benefit is to be expected. Major benefit is to be expected for a task which is difficult to perform, as is the restructuring task. See Figure 1.
Figure 1. A scheme expressing the combined findings of Finke [2] versus Chambers & Reisberg [1] and Reed & Johnsen [4], and the predictions for the benefit of sketching. EXPERIMENTS In two series of experiments, we investigated the benefit value of sketching. The first series embodied a task stressing the synthesis process, based on the Finke paradigm [6]. The second series contained a Reed-like restructuring paradigm [5]. PARADIGMS & RESULTS Synthesis task In our Finke-like paradigm [2,6], subjects had to synthesize three simple 3D elements (e.g. cube, sphere, cone) into an object. Half of the subjects were allowed to sketch, the other half was denied this possibility. It turned out that subjects in both the groups equally applied different synthesizing strategies. Occasionally, some of the original elements in the created objects had undergone changes (e.g. changed proportions) during the task. These element changes were more likely to emerge in the sketch group. Afterwards, judges rated the objects on creativity. Subjects, who applied more synthesis strategies were rated higher, as well as subjects with more element changes in the original elements. Both measures contributed equally to the creativity ratings. Permission to make digital/hard copies of all or part of this material for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copyright is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires specific permission and/or fee. CHI 96 Vancouver, BC Cananda © 1996 ACM 0-89791-777-4/96/04..$3.50 |
Restructuring task In the Reed-like task [4,5], a configuration of 3 overlapping simple 2D wire-frame elements (e.g. square, diamond, right-angled triangle) was briefly presented to the subjects. Such a short presentation time ensures that people are not able to grasp more information from the configuration than the identity of the three elements and their locations. Hence, elements that result from overlap are not conceived, and the image has to be restructured in order to find these elements. Only subjects, who were allowed to sketch performed well on finding these unanticipated elements and they spontaneously started to sketch if allowed to. Finding these new elements in a sketch had a high correlation with the element changes in the Finke-like task and with scores on a creativity test. In both series of experiments untrained sketchers performed worse on the restructuring aspects than trained sketchers, whereas synthesis aspects were performed equally well. CONCLUSIONS The results confirmed our hypotheses; The synthesis process is easy to perform in imagery and not supported by sketching, the restructuring process is difficult to perform in imagery and hence enhanced by sketching. Furthermore, we found that individual creativity enhances the restructuring process, and that the two processes of synthesis and restructuring together constitute the creation of a creative object. Synthesis and Analysis are hypothesized to constitute a creative process in creativity literature. Because of the parallels that can be drawn between these two processes and our two processes, our restructuring process might well equate the Analysis process. IMPLICATIONS FOR COMPUTER TOOLS A list of requirements for both intuitive and helpful computer tools can be deduced from these findings. Since the synthesis process can be easily and rapidly performed before the mental eye, only the end-product of this process is likely to be found externalized. Synthesis itself is, according to our model, never an objective for externalisation, and therefore will occur only in sketches intended to support the restructuring process. Creation of synthesized objects on a computer tool therefore must preferably pass unnoticed, effortlessly and super fast. In the restructuring process the sketcher draws one particular structure but intends to perceptually pick up a new structure with new components from the sketch. Keeping the sketch unspecific and vague allows for this. The requirements for electronic tools that can be distilled from this conclusion is that either the tool has to support unspecific forms of input, or the tool has to be able to switch easily between various structural descriptions after creation. Kolli & Stuyver (reported in [3]) studied the 3D CAD programs Pro-Engineer, Intergraph-EMS, Atari-sculpt 3D and GIG3DGO. The first phase of this study revealed that with today's programs even during a simple synthesis task with simple elements one is faced with ample difficulty. With every program this task consumed considerable time and certainly did not proceed smoothly and unnoticed. Afterwards, in phase II, the subjects had to restructure the elements of the synthesized objects. How the elements had to be restructured was not known at phase I. It turned out that some subjects choose a synthesis form in the first phase that didn't support the altering of the elements in the second phase and hence had to resynthesize the object completely. This latter result indicates that restructuring is a cumbersome job with current 3D CAD programs. Considering that both processes, synthesis and restructuring, equally constitute a creative process, requirements from both processes have to be satisfied in a computer tool. Since, with current 3D CAD-programs, synthesis turns out to be time-consuming where it has to pass unnoticed and restructuring is hardly supported, current 3D CAD-programs don't seem appropriate for supporting the creative process in the conceptual phase. Electronic sketch tablets, which, like paper & pencil, support unspecific input and leave the synthesizing and restructuring to the sketchers still seem, for the time being, to be more appropriate electronic idea-creation tools. REFERENCES 1. Chambers, D. & Reisberg, D. (1985). Can mental images be ambiguous? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 11, 317-328. 2. Finke, R. A. & Slayton, K. (1988). Explorations of creative visual
synthesis in mental imagery. 3. Hennessey, J. M. (1994). Exploring computer enhancements for
conceptualizing.
In: 4. Reed, S. K. & Johnsen, J. A. (1975). Detection of part in patterns
and images. 5. Verstijnen, I. M., van Leeuwen, C. C., Hamel, R. & Hennessey, J. M. Provision of pencil-and-paper as external support to mental imagery enhances retrieval of embedded information. (submitted)
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