My greatest takeaway from my Creative Computing Capstone course was understanding creativity; how it was framed, formed, and judged. Through three lessons learned in the course, I was better able to connect creativity with the relationship of computing to art.
In the talks by Bret Victor that I had to present, he raised the issue that many ideas do not use the medium they take place in to their advantage. He asks why do we still animate in key frames, when we now have tools that can generate animation as performance art? Where in his example, he created animations through the motions of his finger. When making the visualization in our project, I realized that a linear music visualizer generated in 3D did not take advantage of the medium we were presenting our art in – virtual reality. At that point we had already spent many hours tweaking our visualizer, but it did not make our project unique or creative. We eventually decided to pivot and find a way to better use the VR headset we were given. Our second generation visualizer was better able to take advantage of our VR medium by placing the user in a 3D environment where they could be surrounded by the ‘music’. This solution was much more unique and creative. By framing our project to better tailor our medium of presentation, we were able to find more spectacular results.
One of the things that I learned during the making of our project was how a hands-off, yet guiding, approach could promote creativity. Oftentimes, I tend to micromanage group projects to make sure tasks go as planned. Earlier in the semester we did a drawing exercise where we were given a sheet of paper to draw on with five abstract lines already drawn. These five lines served as a constraint to our drawing. Unexpectedly, people were more easily able to produce a piece of creative work. The constraint facilitated creativity in the drawing exercise by providing a guiding, but not overbearing rule on what the final drawing should look like. On this project I took more of hands-off role and allowed my teammates more free-agency over the result of the work. The only constraint I provided was giving everyone their own role. The team was allowed to find their own creative solutions to problems with the promise that I would incorporate them to our visualizer. The result of their work even surprised me, as everyone came up with creative solution that surpassed my expectations. The constraint everyone was given was enough motivation to find solutions to their own problems, but in a manner that allowed them to be creative with their results.
Each milestone presentation also helped me understand the bar at which an idea was considered creative. The critiques we received in our classmates’ feedback, as well as our professors’ helped guide my understanding towards what a creative work should be. At the start of our project, our goal was to make a 3D music visualizer that would work with any song. Our project was more useful than creative and swayed more towards an HCI capstone project. By gauging the feedback given, we stripped many of the features promised in our original idea, such an API to selected songs from Spotify and a song voting system, and focused our efforts more towards using VR to create something unique. The motivation of our project shifted away from something that was supposed to work well as a product in a market to something that just had to appeal to others. As we better understood what a creative work should accomplish — our work became more of a piece of computing art.
Creativity is measured by how well a story can be told in the context of your audience. Creative works abstract away their usefulness and are judged upon how well they appeal to cultural expectations. A creative work, like painting or dance, is a piece of art and a creative work in computer science is just a programmed work of art.