Translating goals into concrete actions is a major challenge for people doing creative activities. Expert examples, tutorials, and videos abound online, helping people find inspiration and learn from the best. However, online resources are detached from the user’s work. The user must determine which resource is most relevant to their particular situation, and adapt it to their context. The sensemaking challenge of using help resources combined with the open-endedness of creative work can be tedious at best, and paralyzing at worst, preventing people from reaching their full creative potential.
In this talk, I will present my dissertation work, which aims to better support the iterative creative process by curating existing expert help and demonstrations and presenting them to users in context. I will focus on video demonstrations, and will discuss three interactive systems – RePlay, ReMap, and LiveClips – that leverage online videos to help users complete tasks and explore new ideas. Through these systems and their evaluations, I will show how curating and presenting expert videos in-situ enables more people to reach their creative potential by lowering the barriers to getting started and completing projects.
Ailie Fraser is a Research Engineer at Adobe focusing on Human-Computer Interaction. In 2020, she received her PhD in Computer Science from UC San Diego, where she was a member of the Design Lab. Her dissertation focused on supporting and improving peoples’ creativity while they work with digital tools by harvesting existing expert resources and presenting them in context. She is a recipient of the NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship and Adobe Research Fellowship. Previously, Ailie completed her Honours Bachelor of Science at the University of Toronto with a Specialist in Math & Computer Science and a Major in Music.