We report on a qualitative study in which 22 participants created Augmented Reality (AR) stories for outdoor cultural heritage sites. As storytelling is a crucial strategy for AR content aimed at providing meaningful experiences, the emphasis has been on what storytelling does, rather than how it is done, the end user's needs prioritized over the author's. To address this imbalance, we identify how recurring patterns in the spatial trajectories and narrative compositions of AR stories for cultural heritage sites are linked to the author's intent and creative process: While authors tend to bind story arcs tightly to confined trajectories for narrative delivery, the need for spatial exploration results in thematic content mapped loosely onto encompassing trajectories. Based on our analysis, we present design recommendations for site-specific AR storytelling tools that can support authors in delivering their intent while leveraging the placeness of cultural heritage sites as a creative resource.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581414
In this paper, we collect an anthology of 100 visual stories from authors who participated in our systematic creative process of improvised story-building based on image sequences. Following close reading and thematic analysis of our anthology, we present five themes that characterize the variations found in this creative visual storytelling process: (1) Narrating What is in Vision vs. Envisioning; (2) Dynamically Characterizing Entities/Objects; (3) Sensing Experiential Information About the Scenery; (4) Modulating the Mood; (5) Encoding Narrative Biases. In understanding the varied ways that people derive stories from images, we offer considerations for collecting story-driven training data to inform automatic story generation. In correspondence with each theme, we envision narrative intelligence criteria for computational visual storytelling as: creative, reliable, expressive, grounded, and responsible. From these criteria, we discuss how to foreground creative expression, account for biases, and operate in the bounds of visual storyworlds.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580744
Feedback is a process that is common in both acoustic and electronic musical instruments, but rare in digital musical tools or creative digital tools more generally. This paper examines the musical use of the 'no-input mixing desk'---or 'feedback mixer', a sound mixing desk fed back on itself---to explore how and why feedback is appealing for musicians. Twenty interviews were conducted with musicians who have used no-input mixing desk in their practice. Thematic analysis is used to explore the interview data. Results highlight the enjoyment and creative fulfilment of working with systems that can't be fully predicted or understood, a sense of gestural immediacy, sensitivity and tactility often perceived as lacking in digital instruments, and an affinity with acoustic instruments in terms of the scope for surprise and exploration.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580662
Online platforms like YouTube and Instagram have enabled the platformization and monetization of creative work, allowing content creators to derive revenue and thrive in a creator economy. While much work has been done to understand content creation on single platforms, the creative practice often involves content creators’ agency and practice to interact with multiple platforms and make strategic decisions to optimize such interactions. In this paper, we use an interview study with 21 cross-platform creators to understand how they negotiate with platforms in their creative practices through the construction of creator ecology. We found that participants developed priorities among platforms based on varied criteria, paid attention to cross-platform content synchronization, and stressed managing and converting audiences across platforms to grow their fanbase. Our findings highlight the complex interplay between creator agency and labor, as well as yield implications for future design possibilities of creator empowerment and support.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581106
Social media platform success relies on users to consume, create, and share creative content. While some creatives aspire to become influencers, this is not the goal of all creatives, particularly those with smaller audiences. Through an interview study of 15 creatives on TikTok, we explore the often overlapping intentions for creating and sharing videos, as well as the challenges to maintaining these creative intentions and routines as they are shaped by platform logic. We find platforms introduce impediments which disrupt people's creative routines and alienate people from their overlapping creative intentions; introducing challenges which alienate people from their sense of self, and their audiences. We construct a broader definition of creative labor - the work of professionalizing and monetizing a creative product shared on social media - reflecting on how the routine enactment of creative labor is impacted by infrastructural elements of technology.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580649
Recently, large language models have made huge advances in generating coherent, creative text. While much research focuses on how users can interact with language models, less work considers the social-technical gap that this technology poses. What are the social nuances that underlie receiving support from a generative AI? In this work we ask when and why a creative writer might turn to a computer versus a peer or mentor for support. We interview 20 creative writers about their writing practice and their attitudes towards both human and computer support. We discover three elements that govern a writer’s interaction with support actors: 1) what writers desire help with, 2) how writers perceive potential support actors, and 3) the values writers hold. We align our results with existing frameworks of writing cognition and creativity support, uncovering the social dynamics which modulate user responses to generative technologies.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580782