Design and Evaluate Support for Non-musicians’ Creative Engagement with Musical Interfaces

Abstract

In the past few decades of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies, experience related topics are proposed as central concerns beyond usability when designing an interactive system. Based on two existing research frameworks within HCI: creativity support and engagement, this research contributes to this trend by asking how to design and evaluate support for novices’ creative engagement with digital interfaces. Drawing on HCI theories of experience, flow, engagement, and research on creative engagement in different domains, this research defines creative engagement as when the user is engaged in an active and constructive cognitive process, and in pursuit of a creative outcome. This thesis presents findings from three case studies to explore the effects of factors that might affect non-musicians’ creative engagement while musicking with interactive music systems. These factors include 1) the control metaphors of interfaces (painterly control metaphor and reactive control metaphor), 2) the task motivations (experiential and utilitarian goal) and features of musicking modes (replay and edit records), 3) the abstract visual stimuli (abstract and straightforward graphical scores, participants playing with or without design information). Based on a number of empirical findings, a systematic understanding of the effects of factors that may influence novices’ creative engagement and a descriptive model of creative engagement are proposed and discussed. This research has direct implications for the design of similar musical interfaces for novices in fields such as New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), as well as interfaces that are aimed at engaging non-experts in creative activities in HCI. Moreover, the mixed-methods approach adopted in this thesis provides informative evidence to conclude the research questions. The empirical evidence that the correlations between participants’ subjective feedback on creative engagement also suggests the potential of using the mixed-methods approach to evaluate creative engagement.