Ph.D. Thesis Defense - Noor Hammad
When
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Description
Date & Time: Friday, September 18th at 2:30pm ET
Location: Gates and Hillman Centers (GHC) 6501
Remote: Zoom Link
Committee:
Jessica Hammer (Co-chair), Carnegie Mellon University
Erik Harpstead (Co-chair), Carnegie Mellon University
Nikolas Martelaro, Carnegie Mellon University
Bryan Wang, Adobe
Max Kreminski, Cornell University
Title:
Trace-Aware Creativity Tools
Abstract:
Digital media creators, including video editors, live streamers, and game developers, rely on diverse creativity tools such as game engines, video editing software, and live streaming platforms to produce their work. These ecosystems are powerful; however they often impose constraints on their users, leading to rigid interfaces that fail to adapt to how creators want to work. Existing tools can limit a creator’s ability to realize ambitious ideas, offer inadequate mechanisms for communication between creators and their audiences, and provide interfaces that do not align with how creators naturally express their preferences. The first half of this thesis explores these misalignments through the development of data-driven tools, resulting in three systems that expand the design possibilities in mobile augmented reality, create novel mechanisms for streamer–audience engagement on live streaming platforms, and support video creators in expressing musical preferences through a vibe-based creative assistant. Taken together, my work on these projects revealed that the content creation process produces a wealth of valuable data, yet this data is often leveraged ad hoc to power isolated features, as opposed to being treated as a foundational resource for designing creator-aligned systems.
Building upon this realization, I argue that the future of creativity tools relies on the deliberate use of Creative Activity Traces as a primary design material. The term Creative Activity Traces refers to the process-related data generated by the creator during their practice, including evolving records of ideas, intermediate artifacts, and metadata yielded during creative work. These traces are often multi-modal, distributed across tools, and deeply personalized. To understand how the HCI community currently works with traces, I conducted a systematic review of 133 creativity tools and developed a preliminary design framework for trace awareness. This review revealed that modern creativity tools either treat activity traces as atemporal raw material, or utilize them only as needed as input to a specific feature, thereby limiting both the temporal scope and design opportunities possible with traces. Rather than continuing to use traces in this way, my thesis instead calls for traces to be treated as a design material to be engaged with at every stage of the research and development process. This approach in turn leads to adaptive systems that stay aligned with how creators work and how and their processes unfold,
The final phase of this research builds upon my theory of creative activity traces and trace-aware tools through the study of video content creators' practices for creating, maintaining, and evolving a recognizable brand across video projects. Through a formative study with seven video creators, I cataloged the traces their practice accumulates over time, the behaviors associated with their accumulated traces across projects, and the frictions they face as a result of their cross-project practices. This work showed that traces share temporal characteristics but are not a uniform material a designer can treat the same way throughout, so much as a single material with differing grains and textures. As traces accumulate across projects, they weave into a whole with a shape of its own, and the individual traces that produced it can be difficult to disentangle into constituent parts.
This thesis contributes to HCI and creativity tool research by framing creative practice as an inherently data-rich process that requires more intentional engagement from the HCI research community. I formalize the definitions of creative activity traces and trace-aware tools, and I offer a design framework for trace-awareness. I show what it means to treat traces as a critical building block for designing creativity tools rather than as a byproduct of creative work. Taken together, these contributions set forth a trace-aware agenda for the next generation of creativity tools, one that keeps creators and their evolving practices in view as digital creative production grows more automated and uncertain.
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