The Process, Interaction, and Creativity Lab (PICL) is part of the Interactive Computing Group at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We seek to understand, support, and re-envision how computational tools relate to creative process. To do so, we build and study computational creativity support tools, perform qualitative research, and deploy new tools in the real world.
For Prospective Students
If you are a prospective graduate student interested in HCI, creativity, or education, apply to UIUC Computer Science and mention Dr. Sterman in your application.
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Creative and Motivational Strategies of Expert Creative Practitioners
C&C 2022
Explores how creative practitioners intentionally manage their creative process, for example by developing strategies to break out of ruts or stay motivated through uncertainty. Understanding the way experts engage with and manage creativity-relevant processes represents a rich source of foundational knowledge for designers of creativity support tools. We identify four strategies for managing process and discuss implications for the design of process-focused creativity support tools.
Best Paper Award
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Towards Creative Version Control
CSCW 2022
Explores how creative practitioners use version control tools and history information in creative process, and introduces four key considerations for version control in creative work: using versions as a palette of materials, providing confidence and freedom to explore, leveraging low-fidelity version capture, and reflecting on and reusing versions across long time scales. We discuss how the themes present across this wide range of mediums and domains can provide insight into future designs and uses of version control systems to support creative process.
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Kaleidoscope: A Reflective Documentation Tool for a User Interface Design Course
CHI 2023
Presents Kaleidoscope, a novel tool for documenting and interacting with design history in studio HCI courses. We deployed this tool in an upper-level HCI course during the COVID-19 pandemic to support student learning through feedback, reflection, and interactions with project histories.
Best Paper Award
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A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants
CHI 2024
In our era of rapid technological advancements, the research landscape for writing assistants has become increasingly fragmented across various research communities. We seek to address the challenge by proposing a design space as a structured way to examine and explore the multidimensional space of intelligent and interactive writing assistants. Through community collaboration, we explore five aspects of writing assistants: task, user, technology, interaction, and ecosystem. Within each aspect, we define dimensions and codes by systematically reviewing 120 papers while leveraging the expertise of researchers in various disciplines. Our design space aims to offer researchers and designers a practical tool to navigate, comprehend, and compare the various possibilities of writing assistants, and aid in the design of new writing assistants.
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Interacting with Literary Style through Computational Tools
CHI 2020
Presents a computational technique to surface style in written text. We collect a dataset of crowdsourced human judgments of style, derive a model of style by training a neural net on this data, and present novel applications for visualizing and browsing style across broad bodies of literature, as well as an interactive text editor with real-time style feedback. We study these interactive style applications with users and discuss implications for enabling this novel approach to style.
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