I School professor Kimiko Ryokai and 2009 MIMS graduates Michael Lee and Jonathan Breitbart have been awarded the 2009 Creativity and Cognition Conference's "Best Paper" award for their paper "Children's Storytelling and Programming with Robotic Characters."
The project explored how five- to ten-year-old children interact with Pleo, a robotic dinosaur toy, in a mixed physical and digital authoring environment.
The researchers' informal observations of children playing with Pleo showed that they enjoyed cuddling with Pleo, and like with a real pet, wanted to teach Pleo special tricks. In response to this observation, the researchers designed a system to allow children to actively create and control Pleo’s behavior.
The researchers invited the children to create stories with with enriched drawings that were programmed to control Pleo; the customized Pleo was programmed to respond to the children’s drawings as well as to their touch. Children created their stories by drawing props and programming how the robotic character should respond to those props and to physical touch.
The research explored the role that technology can play in supporting children’s everyday creative storytelling. The researchers found that their system gave children the control to drive their own interactive characters and imaginative stories. The children created complex stories involving their own drawings, various behaviors they programmed into Pleo, reactions they provided to Pleo, and their narrating voices that connected these elements.
In addition, I School doctoral student Daniela Rosner was awarded the conference's "Best Student Paper" award for "Reflections on Craft: Probing the Creative Process of Everyday Knitters." The paper explores the intersection of traditional techniques such as weaving and pottery with new information and communication technologies; in this research, Rosner and Ryokai conducted a qualitative study of crafters introduced to technology that digitally augments craft practice. The paper describes how these craft activities provide a useful lens onto contemporary technological appropriation.
The 7th Creativity and Cognition Conference was held October 27–30 at UC Berkeley and the Berkeley Art Museum. Under the theme "Everyday Creativity," the conference asked how to enable everyone to enjoy their creative potential, bringing together academics and practitioners, makers and scientists, artists and theoreticians. The conference provided a forum for lively interdisciplinary debate exploring methods and tools to support creativity at the intersection of art and technology.
The conference was sponsored ACM SIGCHI (Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction), in cooperation with SIGMM, SIGART, and SIGSOFT.
