Casual Creators: a roadmap
Welcome to my dissertation blog! It’s gonna be a thrilling couple of months as this comes together.
What are Casual Creators, and why am I studying them? They're a genre of software (well, usually software) that is designed to make casual users feel creative. Apps like Let's Create Pottery, or in-game editors like the Spore Creature Creator help everyday novice users make great stuff that otherwise would take a lot of training and skill to make. I'm also interested in how these apps also help users share what they've made, and how users use their creations to communicate with others. The diagram above shows some of the many different ways these systems can work. They often have a generator as central part, like many computational creativity systems. A well-built generator can enable all kinds of other interaction, between art-generating bots, humans, and communities, which is why I'm starting my blog with this image. It shows Casual Creators as an ecosystem of interconnected parts, not just a monolithic content generator.
I hope you will find this area of study useful to you!
To conclude this first post, here's my official academic definition of casual creators:
A Casual Creator is an interactive system that encourages the fast, confident, and pleasurable exploration of a possibility space, resulting in the creation or discovery of surprising new artifacts that bring feelings pride, ownership, and creativity to the users that make them.