Engaging in creative activities makes people happy. Creativity support tools (CSTs) are technologies that facilitate creative activities in the digital domain; however, little is known about how the use of CSTs affects happiness stemming from creative endeavours. To address this gap, we conducted a two-phase study. First, we carried out an exploratory interview study (N=15) to examine participants’ perceptions of how their chosen CSTs impacted their feelings of happiness. Our analysis shows that the CSTs our participants used introduced barriers to benefits typically associated with creativity---such as feeling joy, experiencing satisfaction, and alleviating negative feelings---and therefore did not make them happy. To explore how CSTs might be designed to facilitate happiness, we conducted a brainstorming study with experts (N=9). Participants generated six ideas for happiness-promoting CSTs. Drawing from both phases, we present a set of implications for design to help re-imagine CSTs as supports for cultivating happiness through creativity.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems