Computing has given rise to a wide range of software tools for supporting all stages of a creative process, from ideation and prototyping to disseminating finished creative works. More recently, these tools have begun to incorporate social elements, drawing on a growing body of research demonstrating the benefits of collaboration for enhancing creativity. Crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which allow software developers to programmatically seek out human workers to complete online micro-tasks and integrate the results directly into a user interface, suggest exciting new opportunities to design social technologies that support creative processes. In this talk, I will describe some of my recent projects in this space. These include Pipeline, a tool for supporting leaders of artistic collaborations organized online; and CrowdCrit, a system that crowdsources critiques of visual designs and aggregates the results for designers. I will also present some preliminary work using social technologies to help solve historical mysteries. Throughout the talk, I will identify broader theoretical and design implications for social computing and creativity support tools.
Kurt Luther is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, where he is also a member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and a faculty affiliate in Human Centered Design. His general research interests include social computing, crowdsourcing, and creativity support tools. Specifically, he builds and studies social computing systems that support creativity and discovery, with applications to citizen science, movie and game production, visual design, digital humanities, and other domains. His research has been featured by TIME, CNN, and Harvard Business Review. Previously, he was a postdoc in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech, where he was named a Foley Scholar, the GVU Center's highest honor. His undergraduate degree is from Purdue University, where he studied computer graphics, art, and design. He has also worked in the Social Computing groups at Microsoft Research and IBM Research, and the User Experience team at YouTube.