Making Sense of Creative Interactions

The aim of this project is to better understand the impact of interactive technology on the creative process of working artists and further, to develop knowledge that will enhance the design of future interactive technologies used by creative practitioners.Creativity is a difficult problem to grapple with. It has been attributed to an occurrence of divine intervention, as the outcome of processes in the brain, social processes, genius and mental illness. As such there is no single authoritative definition of what creativity is. Arguably, the problem of understanding creativity is made even harder as new technology replaces the traditional media or methods that creative people use in their practices, thus altering the very nature of their creative processes. As such, understanding creativity becomes tied to an understanding of the use of technology within creative practices. Furthermore, the continual advancement of digital interactive technologies challenges our understanding of these creative practices, as they alter the creative workspace. It is therefore important to tackle this issue now so that we can design better technology for creative practitioners in the future.This project will approach this problem by investigating how real artists use both traditional and new media methods within their creative practice. Case studies will be conducted that employ observation of their real-time working practice in their own working environments. Interviews will also be conducted that aim to understand the artists own perspective on the way in which they cope with the problems that emerge as they use new technologies. These studies will provide detailed documentary evidence of artistic practice in action and will allow for the comparison between different types of artistic practice e.g. graphics and illustration as well as the comparison of different methods and technologies e.g. traditional painting and digital image making.These studies will highlight the way in which technology is impacting on the creative practice of different groups of artists. As such they will provide invaluable knowledge that can be brought to bear on the problem of how to improve interactive technologies for creative practitioners.