The Casual Creators Workshop aims to foster experimentation and build community around the topic of casual creators: a recently-defined genre of creativity support tools that are specifically designed to support autotelic creativity, or creativity for its own sake. We also hope to promote discussion of the creative practices that emerge around casual creators, which are often casual, unskilled, ephemeral, and social.

The workshop will take place online, as part of the International Conference on Computational Creativity, on September 14-18, 2021.

We have decided to pull the workshop from this year’s ICCC due to low submissions, owing to the conditions of the past year.

We plan to reinstate the workshop next year, when the casual creator community has had more time to recover from such a taxing and traumatic year. We are discussing alternative means of gathering and sharing ideas in an informal setting; if you would like to contribute to this conversation, please email us to get connected.

Tamara Duplantis, Jasmine Otto, Kate Compton

Topics

We’re interested in a wide variety of topics related to casual creators and casual creativity. Here’s some things we’d love to see represented within the workshop:

• Reports on the design and development of new casual creators
• Analyses and comparisons of existing casual creators, including papers that identify, name and survey distinct sub-genres of casual creators, or recurring design patterns
• Approaches to human-centered evaluation of casual creators
• Theories of creativity that address autotelic creativity – creativity for its own sake, – or creativity in non-expert users
• Theories of creativity that address ephemeral and experiential creativity
• Casual creativity in a social or performative contexts (e.g. streaming, quilting bees, or online crafting communities)
• Learnings about casual creativity from existing fields and communities of practice (e.g. museum interaction design, improvisation, arts education, crafting kits)
• Casual creator design inspiration from game design and other play design fields, or casual creators embedded in game contexts (such as character creators or house-decoration mini games)
• Casual creator design inspiration from “little languages” (small or approachable domain-specific programming languages) and related programming languages research
• Mixed-initiative co-creativity: AI and humans making things together
• Casual creators as intervention in computational creativity: taking computational creativity systems and making them interactive as a method of interrogating them.
• Novel tools (motion control, neural interface, GANs/ML) that compromise direct user control, but may complement the less-controlled interaction of a casual creator
• Casual creators for unexpected use cases, such as health, political, educational, or persuasive purposes, i.e. ”serious casual creators”

We are particularly interested in reports on failed experiments related to any topic in our purview, with insight into what went wrong and how others can learn from the failure.

Submissions

The Casual Creators Workshop accepts three kinds of submissions:

• Full papers. Regular papers submitted for oral presentation. 5-8 pages in length, excluding references. To be presented during the workshop as a 20-minute talk in our Virbela space.
• Short papers. Like regular papers, but smaller. Up to 4 pages in length, excluding references. To be presented at the workshop as a 10-minute talk in our Virbela space.
• Position papers up to 4 pages in length, excluding references. As this is an emerging field, we welcome papers that set the directions that this field will grow in the future, concerns to keep in mind as we grow, and lessons that this field can learn from existing fields of practice. To be presented at the workshop as a 10-minute talk.

Submissions should be made via Easy Chair.  Papers must be submitted as PDF documents, formatted according to the ICCC template, and anonymized for double-blind review.

Papers of any kind may optionally be accompanied by an interactive demo. Demos will be displayed as part of a casual demo session during the workshop.

Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, similar to last year’s.

Important Dates

• Submissions due: May 21st, 2021 June 22th, 2021
• Acceptance notification: June 22nd, 2021 July 20th, 2021
• Camera-ready papers due: July 5th, 2021 August 2nd, 2021
• Workshop: Mid-September (date TBA), 2021

Organizers

• Kate Compton (Northwestern University, Evanston, IL)
• Tamara Duplantis (UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA)
• Jasmine Otto (UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA)

To contact the organizers, please reach out to jtotto [at] ucsc.edu and tduplant [at] ucsc.edu with ‘CCW’ in your subject line.