Creative Interface Design for Information Seeking

Inspired by Weisberg's argument that everyone is creative, and exists in varying degrees, this PhD proposal aims to investigate the relationship between creativity and information seeking, and explores implications for interface design with design features that might support users' information seeking behaviours. A holistic model of creativity was proposed synthesizing established models in creativity. Based on the model, five approaches investigating relationships between creativity and information seeking were highlighted. Initial work carried out attempted to understand users' information seeking behaviours to elicit supportive features. Discussion of ongoing work is also presented to indicate approaches proposed to design, implement, and evaluate a prototype with design features to support information seeking. 1 Background and Motivation Traditional approaches to solving precision and recall problems seem inadequate in addressing users' needs and intentions as they assume that users are competent information seekers and can specify their needs in queries, and that words used to describe documents are similar between indexers and users [5]. Hence, this PhD research proposes a novel way to address limitations in traditional information retrieval (IR) systems by incorporating design features in an IR interface to support users' information seeking behaviours. This investigation is inspired by Weisberg's argument that creativity exists in everyone and is a result of ordinary thinking [14], and creativity varies in people and may have a relationship with information seeking. It can, hence, be logically inferred that every information seeker is creative, and the extent of a person's creativity influences his/her information seeking behaviour. Creativity can be defined from many perspectives. For example, creativity may be " natural " based on one's creative traits or creativity may be " nurtured " which is due to domain knowledge and information seeking skills. Here, we are concerned with " nurtured " creativity.