Approaches

CREA! (Creative Research Environment for Air Traffic Management) is an inter-disciplinary approach to design that encourages intersections between art, design and technology borrowing from each discipline practices, methods and experience for the definition of innovative concepts. The application of the approach in complex domains like ATM is innovative and challenging since the exploitation of design practices and methods from disciplines different from engineering and human factors is largely unexplored. All innovation in such domain is constrained by a problem solving view, neglecting other factors like aesthetic, affective, cultural and emotional aspects of human cognition. CREA! leverages creativity in action in artistic domains and offers a process model to integrate a variety of suggestions into integrated solutions. Our approach is inspired by Cultural Historical Psychology (Vygotsky, 1978) in its attention to understand creative activities. The central theme of this approach is that creative activities are social and thinking is not confined to the individual brain/mind. The construction of knowledge is embedded in the cultural and historical milieu in which it arises. Differently from classical cognitive approaches like Creative Cognition (Finke, R.A., Ward, T.B., Smith, S. 1992)  which have concentrated on information, its mental representation and propagation; CREA! is concerned with the study of creative activities which involve the mastery of external devices and tools through social collaboration and co-construction of knowledge. Whilst the cognitive approach focuses on the development of conceptual schemes to describe a multilevel information processing that can explain the basic functioning of creativity, we are interested in the analysis of the social dynamics that develop in processes of collaborative meaning building. Our interpretation of creativity indeed is mainly a social process of co-construction of knowledge through the negotiation of meaning and the collaborative creation of design visions tools.

CREA! is not a new methodology but a systematic design approach that integrates best practices, partly documented in literature but mostly coming from the long experience of the Deep Blue staff; a sound theoretical background including activity theory, distributed cognition and cultural psychology, and well consolidated design approach based on user-centred design and participatory design (King, Anderson 1995).

CREA! is a co-evolutionary process in which user studies, concept generation and technology development/benchmarking are carried out in parallel (divergence phase) and then integrated (the convergence phase) in form of concept scenarios to feed user-centred and participatory design sessions.

Its strength it that it integrates well-known design approaches, coming respectively from the industrial design and from the information systems design fields, but it also absorbs the principles of theories including activity theory, distributed cognition and cultural psychology.

Of necessity, such kind of approach usually generates an extraordinary diversity of ‘components', technologies and integrated prototypes. All these activities are performed in strict collaboration with end users including stakeholders at different levels. Towards the end of the development, the parallel processes merge and produce one final result that will take advantage of all contribution and manage both innovation and user adaptation.

CREA! depicts strategies for creative design that are based on the activity of a multidisciplinary team that firstly produces high level concepts from the point of view of a single discipline, and then integrates them in concept scenarios through a collaborative activity of meaning negotiation and sharing of values carried out in brainstorming sessions. Furthermore CREA! elaborates a strategy of participatory design and evaluation that evolves concepts scenarios in form of mock-ups and interactive prototypes to support user evaluation and involvement in re-design. The software development starts only once prototypes have been fully accepted by the users. 

The primary aim of the evaluation proposed in CREA! is not only to verify, validate, and test the acceptance of a system, but to determine problems and design opportunities. Frequent, small, informal evaluation activities iteratively improve the design. The approach hinges on iterative cycles of evaluation with end-users, from concept generation to functional specifications, from early mock-ups to the testing of interactive prototypes on the field. Evaluation is continuous and as closely and authentically related to use as possible.

In order to guarantee such a close relationship, the design and evaluation process are strongly informed by scenarios of use. Concepts, ideas, scenarios, prototypes and evolving work practices are continuously examined in the light of all the perspectives to ensure their quality and appropriateness.

The proposed approach suggests to adopt cheap, fast and easy to use methods that still achieve the goal of designing effective solutions that affect human activity providing added value. Techniques include brainstorming, focus groups, mock-up development, storyboarding, scenarios, walkthroughs and participatory heuristic evaluation. These techniques allow users to enhance their ability to relate to the design team without being afraid of the innovation process (which is usually associated with a loss of control), and ease the creative process however innovative the concepts are.

CREA! proposes a systematic evaluation along all the main phases of the design process:

• the project vision,
• high level concepts,
• activity models,
• conceptual requirements,
• concept scenarios,
• early mock-ups and functional specifications,
• low-fi prototypes,
• interactive prototypes integrated in full scale scenarios. 

The novelty of the approach relies not simply in the development of new techniques for creative design but in the formulation of a design process that harmonizes creative production with user centred design.

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