Human-Computer Co-Creativity: Designing, Evaluating and Modelling Computational Collaborators for Poetry Writing

Research output: ThesisDoctoral ThesisCollection of Articles

Abstract

Human-computer co-creativity examines creative collaboration between humans and artificially intelligent computational agents. Human-computer
co-creativity researchers assume that instead of using computational systems to merely automate creative tasks, computational creativity methods
can be leveraged to design computational collaborators capable of sharing
creative responsibility with a human collaborator. This has potential for
extending both human and computational creative capability. This thesis focuses on the case of one human and one computational collaborator.
More specifically this thesis studies how children collaborate with a computational collaborator called the Poetry Machine in the linguistically creative
task of writing poems.
This thesis investigates three topics related to human-computer co-creativity:
The design of human-computer co-creative systems, their evaluation and
the modelling of human-computer co-creative processes. These topics are
approached from two perspectives: an interaction design perspective and
a computational creativity perspective. The interaction design perspective
provides practical methods for the design and evaluation of interactive systems as well as methodological frameworks for analysing design practices
in the field. The computational creativity perspective then again provides
a theoretical view to the evaluation and modelling of human-computer cocreativity. The thesis itself consists of five papers.
This thesis starts with an analysis of the interaction design process for
computational collaborators. The design process is examined through a
review of case studies, and a thorough description of the design process
of the Poetry Machine system described in Paper I. The review shows
that several researchers in the field have assumed a user-centered design
approach, but some good design practices, including the reporting of design
decisions, iterative design and early testing with users are not yet fulfilled
according to the best standards.
After illustrating the general design process, this thesis examines different
approaches to the evaluation of human-computer co-creativity. Two case
studies are conducted to evaluate the usability of and user experiences
with the Poetry Machine system. The first evaluations are described in
Paper II. They produced useful feedback for developing the system further.
The second evaluation, described in Papers III and IV, investigates specific
metrics for evaluating the co-creative writing experience in more detail.
To promote the accumulation of design knowledge, special care is taken
to report practical issues related to evaluating co-creative systems. These
include, for example, issues related to formulating suitable evaluation tasks.
Finally the thesis considers modelling human-computer co-creativity. Paper
V approaches modelling from a computationally creative perspective, by
extending the creativity-as-a-search paradigm into co-creative systems. The
new model highlights specific issues for interaction designers to be aware of
when designing new computational collaborators.
Original languageEnglish
Supervisors/Advisors
  • Toivonen, Hannu TT, Supervisor
Place of PublicationHelsinki
Publisher
Print ISBNs978-951-51-5336-4
Electronic ISBNs978-951-51-5337-1
Publication statusPublished - 13 Aug 2019
MoE publication typeG5 Doctoral dissertation (article)

Note regarding dissertation

Defence on 13th of August 2019
Pre-examiners:
Georgios N. Yannakakis, University of Malta, Malta
Brian Magerko, Ivan Allen College, Georgia Institute of Technology,
Georgia, United States of America
Opponent:
Mary Lou Maher, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, North
Carolina, United States of America
Custos:
Hannu Toivonen, University of Helsinki, Finland

Fields of Science

  • 113 Computer and information sciences

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