Review by: Dreier, Matthias (2004-07-29)

Ben Shneiderman is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland and Founding Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. He is a Fellow of the ACM and received the ACM CHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. In this publication he presents GENEX, a framework for modelling a creative process.

The GENEX (generator of excellence) framework consists of four phases: Collect – learn from previous work, Relate – consult with peers and mentors, Create – compose and evaluate possible solutions, and Donate – disseminate the results. Various software tools exist to support each phase of the framework, such as digital libraries to collect information, newsgroups to communicate with peers, simulations and what-if-tools to explore possible solutions, and websites to publish new results. However, these tools do not integrate well. They ought to be able to record and replay previous steps, to e-mail the current state to colleagues, and to compare the current solution with those stored in a library. It may sound ambitious, but Shneiderman argues that the way word processors evolved from typewriting tools to modern publishing applications offering spell and grammar checking, database, graphic and spreadsheet features, a similar development might just as well come true for integrated design tools. Another encouraging example is the way the World Wide Web reduced the effort to retrieve information and to communicate with people all over the world. Shneiderman also shows the limitations of computer support for creativity. Permanent access to previous works might suppress more exotic ideas. Simulations might restrict imagination to what is possible with the functionality of these tools.

This article is a call for a better integration of various creative activities, but also a call for a more liberal sharing of creative ideas. Promising approaches exists, supportive software tools exist, too, but there is still a lack of organisational and technological infrastructure that supports collaborative creative processes. Shneiderman provides an elaborate model of the creative process and illustrates how software tools might facilitate this process. The sole weakness of this publication is the rather mechanical perspective on creativity. The psychological research on creativity is clearly beyond the scope of this article.