Pre‐print: Note That There May Be Small Changes between This Draft and the Final Printed Version. Embodying Digital Creativity: Designing Computer Tools to Support Spontaneity and Creative Work in the Digital Arts

“An essential voice in creatively based thinking is the language of the body...” (Johnston, 1986, p. 21). Depending on your background, claims such as this may seem obvious or surprising, but are they actually true and can they be validated? If true, can we use this insight to design computational tools that better support creativity? These questions drove an extended investigation of how increasing embodiment impacts people’s creative process when using computational tools for artistic tasks. Unlike Lise Amy Hansen's Sync tool (see Chapter 8), which aims to enhance creativity in dance and the movement arts, our work is focused on supporting creativity for common tasks in computer graphics and animation. During this work, we built software tools designed to support greater spontaneity and embodiment: features common in artistic practices like theatre, but poorly supported in most computational tools. We then studied how working with these tools impacted users’ creativity. Preliminary results indicate that embodiment does appear to enhance certain factors related to creativity. This chapter will first summarize some of the relevant theoretical background, then describe our investigations on the role of embodiment in supporting creativity and conclude with a discussion of lessons learned and next steps.