Recombinant design : leveraging process capture for collective creativity

Abstract

Design is omnipresent and fundamental to the modern world, yet so little of the rich semantic information of the design evolution is preserved. If we are to gain the greatest knowledge and utility from a creative work, we must understand and preserve the process by which it was designed. To pursue this understanding, I have designed and implemented two electronic media-based process capture frameworks that automatically capture and share process as well as provide process reviewing tools. The first system, Chronicler, is a universal capture framework which captures fine-grained process information at an action resolution, demonstrated through the example of a painting program. The second system, Artwork Genealogy, a component of the OPENSTUDIO project, uses versions embedded with process metadata to document the evolution of artwork in an open collaborative community. This web-based system was launched to users in February 2006 and continues to collect art processes from an active and growing community. Through simple, friendly user interfaces, these two systems encourage designers to donate to a repository of shared, searchable design information from which design rationale, the explanations for design decisions, can be inferred.

(cont.) The comparison of these two systems, through data mining and user analysis, shows the effectiveness of these methods for collaborative process capture and combinatorial process reuse. In particular, I demonstrate the ability of process capture systems to give rise to emergent behaviors, uncover process regularities, and to empower designers through five key areas: learning from past work, reusing ideas and work, expression, attribution, and evaluation.