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The amateur creator

Published: 12 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Important design problems are raised in developing software for amateur users, a group distinguished here from novices. The authors argue that these design problems can be approached by understanding how systems for amateurs are derived from those for skilled users, through a combination of transformations we describe as foregrounding, backgrounding, automation, integration and constraining. Useful comparisons are offered with popular product designs. A broader, partly historical, context is then described in which media technologies propagate from use by specialists to use by these amateurs, and the latter change from consumers to creators. The discussion is focused by a description of difficulties with existing software encountered in the course of a creative schools-based project, intended to enable young users both to explore virtual worlds and to design and populate them with their own avatars. The authors argue that HCI design would benefit from a clearer grasp of the special characteristics of designing for amateur users and of transforming existing software for their use.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    C&C '05: Proceedings of the 5th conference on Creativity & cognition
    April 2005
    334 pages
    ISBN:1595930256
    DOI:10.1145/1056224
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 12 April 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. amateur
    2. automation
    3. backgrounding
    4. constraints
    5. consumer
    6. creative
    7. foregrounding
    8. integration
    9. novice
    10. product design

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    C&C '05
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    C&C '05: Creativity and Cognition 2005
    April 12 - 15, 2005
    London, United Kingdom

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