 So I am going to introduce the first Peter of this session. His name is Peter Danskow. He's professor of interaction design at Ohus University. He is also the director of Center for Digital Creativity in three major research projects that explore digital creativity and collaboration. And he's here today to talk about creativity and computers. Please give Peter a hand. Thank you so much, Christiana, and thank you for putting me in this inspiring session. I very much look forward to hearing the next speakers as well. I've also actually really enjoyed this conference and at the conference we've seen many examples of how digital systems are spreading into more and more spheres of human activity. In my work I'm particularly fascinated with what happens when computers become part of and gradually change one particular type of activity, namely creativity. We've also seen at this conference many new and fascinating technologies out there, and it's very easy to get seduced by them. I can feel that myself with with several of the things I've seen here over the past two days. But as a researcher my goal here today is not to promote a specific technology or service. It is rather to present you with some principles and insights that might be of use to you when you shape workflows to support creative work in your organizations or in your own working life. And when you develop new tools to support creative work, regardless of the specific types of technologies that you might use. So you can think of what I'm about to present you as an overview of research into the workflows of creative professionals and insights into how we might get better at supporting and augmenting creative work. So in the talk there are two main points I'd like to make about the interplay between creativity and computers. And the first point is that digital tools and creative work practices are intertwined and they co-evolve over the course of time. And by this I mean that new technologies influence how we shape and how we think and create. And in return we create digital tools to help us think, explore and create in new ways. So in a sense we shape our tools and our tools shape us in creative work. And following this is my second point. If we want to create tools that are good at supporting and augmenting creative work, it's not enough for us to understand all the amazing things we can do from a technical perspective, although that may very well be the prerequisite for building new tools. Now we must also understand the ways in which creatives work and the dynamics and principles that drive creative processes. As Christiane said, I'm the founder and co-director of the Center for Digital Creativity here at Olds University and our core interest is exactly to explore these issues. We're approximately 20 researchers and developers working on this. Before I jump into my main presentation, just a brief introductory comment. One of the things we know from creativity research is that a crucial component in creativity is diversity. And you just heard the names of the presenters. I realized a couple of days ago that except for our moderator, Christiane Weiler, I am in fact in a session full of male speakers. So I've tried to stick to only using examples of female pioneers in the field of digital creativity in my presentation. So on with it. The big trend that we explore in our research center is, broadly speaking, what happens when we go from a situation in which we primarily have used computers to automate routine work and develop principles for creating systems that support this to moving into a situation in which we to a wider and wider extent use digital tools and creativity and knowledge work. In our center, we work with a range of different industries and domains. In order to explore this, our collaborators include, among others, LEGO education, Microsoft research, design it, as well as a range of public institutions and partners such as municipalities and libraries across Europe. We've also worked a lot with architects to explore the potentials of integrating digital systems into the built environment. Here on top is an example of a collaboration with Big Martin Professional, the Center for Advanced Visualization and Interaction, and Kulishon Architects, who you'll hear more about from one of its founders just in a short while. The collaboration was about developing an interactive facade for the Danish pavilion at the World Expo in Shanghai. And one of the insights from doing these types of research collaborations is that new technological opportunities don't just result in new digitally enhanced end products. They also lead us to develop new tools to support creative processes. Architecture, in this case, is rather an interesting domain for us to study because it's quite clear to see how the development of new tools can directly influence the outcome of the process. But it's also interesting because it demonstrates how tools can influence and change how we think. So architects' ideas about what architecture is will change and co-evolve with technology. And in return, some architects will then develop new tools to see and think in new ways. And this goes for a wider range of domains as well. When we explore how tools, especially digital tools, are used and developed in creative work, we realize that when we look at the front runners, at the pioneers across a range of domains, all the way from the performing arts to the science labs, we see that many of these pioneers don't just use the tools that are given to them. They find new and clever ways to hack them, to recombine them. They use them for unintended purposes and they create new tools. And they do so in order to be able to discover new things in the world, to experiment in ways that were not possible before and to think things that were previously unthinkable. And that's a couple of examples. You have here, on your left-hand side, Ilse-Marie Pell, one of the mothers of electronic music, Adaine, who is very much a tinkerer and an inventor herself. Today, we have pioneers such as Rebecca Fiebringer on your right, who explores how to develop AI systems that creatives can understand, train and customize to fit their particular purposes. Here are another couple of photos from some of our work and what you see might look like a mess to you. It might actually be a mess, in a sense. But these are, in fact, workspaces of one of our collaborators, the Bartlett in London. The Bartlett is the highest ranked school of architecture in the world. So what you see here are actually highly-skilled practitioners working in a world-class environment, the natural habitat, so to speak. And the reason that I show this to you is that when we talk about digital tools, we have a tendency to often focus on individual tools. And this is really nice if we want to achieve the best possible standalone tools. And there are a lot of tools out there that are really well-suited for very specific tasks in creative work. But what we find in many different forms of creative work is that many creatives don't just use one tool and not even one tool at a time. They use a complex mix of resources. Materials and tools. And they combine and employ them in different ways, depending on the situation. And they very often work collaboratively, using tools and materials in partnership with other professionals and to a wider and wider extent, perhaps even in partnership with intelligent machines. So creative mastery in this way is not just a question of learning how to use a tool, but learning how to figure out how to string all of these resources together in dynamic ways in response to specific tasks and challenges. This complex mess of resources and tools is not just something we see with analog tools and materials in our physical environment. It also goes through our digital infrastructures, although we often tend to think of the digital realm as being much more structured. But let's take an example from another domain that we're studying at the moment, namely writing. Normally, when you ask people which tool they use for writing, they will say something like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. And that is partly correct. But here's a concrete example from a current research project in which we examine the different types of tools that people use to support the creative process of writing. And what we see here are actually 12 different tools stringed together by one person for a particular writing process. And these tools range all the way from searching, collecting, organizing, tracking, reading, annotating, making notes, making sense of things, starting to put together strings of arguments and narratives and so on, until we get to the very final tool for composing the thing which might then be something like Word. And the reason I mentioned this to you is that when we look at these tools and we talk to these people, we find that these tools, only to a very limited extent, are able to communicate, but not very interoperable. It's hard even to do something that you would imagine as being simple, as moving text from one into the other, let alone let's say that in tool number three you want to annotate something and hope that this propagates or spreads to tool number 11. That's never going to happen with the current systems we have now. So this leads to another point which may to some of you sound controversial, which is that the way that we have designed many of our current IT system actually hinders and complicates creative work. On the one hand, because it's hard to combine and integrate tools in meaningful ways, and it's even harder to modify them so that they fit into creative practices. If we think about a few of the things I've said before and think about how creative professionals need to combine tools dynamically to hack them, to develop them and string them together, we can see why this might be a problem. But more so, this is also the case because there are many critical aspects of the creative process that current tools simply haven't been developed to support. And as I started out by saying many tools have been built to automate routine work, and this means that we have developed principles for developing certain types of tools that emphasize things like efficiency, minimizing errors, adhering to standards. And these are fine principles we teach them to our students when we want to teach them how to create usable systems. I wouldn't recommend that we disregard them. But we must also realize that these are very different principles from the principles and processes that are central to creative work such as experimentation, improvisation, combining and remixing seemingly opposing ideas or even learning from mistakes. In a sense, we can see the state of affairs as a problem and it certainly can be for creative professionals today. But I'd also say that we can see this as a range of opportunities that open up for us to explore both in research and industry. Opportunities for rethinking and redesigning the tools we have now and opportunities for creating software and tools which could exist to better support creative work but which we have not yet invented. And this to me is fascinating stuff. Now, a question I was asked when I was invited to do this talk was to talk about the creative tool of tomorrow and what it might look like. The way I'd like to try to answer that question is not to point to one specific tool, although we try to build a range of prototypes that embody some of these principles in our research center. But rather to suggest principles for you to consider, maybe in collaboration with us or other researchers or with each other, when you go out and create new workflows and new tools. The first of these is that we should create systems that don't log users into disconnected one-size-fits-all standard standalone software. Rather, we should develop systems in a way that will help creatives tinker with, adapt, combine and create tools themselves. As an example from how we explore this in our research center, we develop collaborative notebooks that people can recode and continue to develop as their workflows change and as their skillset evolves over the course of time. We should build tools that gracefully integrate digital and physical components because most creatives actually use both in their work, sorry. On our side, we're exploring this by creating, for instance, systems that integrate digital and analog sticky notes and whiteboards. We should build tools that support collaboration and this might sound self-evident. I suspect many of you actually build tools that have collaborative features. But when we go out and observe these tools that people are using in creative practices today, we see that most of these tools have first and foremost been developed for single users. Whereas most of the work processes we see are highly collaborative. So we should take this seriously when we build our tools and not just plaster on collaborative features as an afterthought. And by this, I mean, if you think, for instance, of Google Docs, which I like and use very much myself and which is probably one of the most widely used collaborative work tools, for better or worse, it looks very much like and functions to a wide extent like a word processor from the 1980s with features for collaboration plaster on top. On our side, we're exploring this principle by creating systems to capture and share knowledge that people create together, for instance, in events in public libraries. And last but not least, we should integrate the insights and all of the knowledge that we actually possess already from research into creativity and consider how we can make systems that not only enable us to automate and to speed up work, but to help us see, think and create new ways. On our side, we're, for instance, doing this by developing systems that support designers in creating shared collections of ideas and help them remix and combine ideas through a design process. This brings me to the conclusion of my talk. I want to thank you for listening. And as a publicly funded researcher, I also want to thank all of the many funding bodies that have made our work possible. And to thank the many researchers and collaborators in our center and beyond. And I like to end by saying that many of the challenges we face today, both in terms of industry innovation, but also on a larger societal scale, our challenges I think require us to see, think, explore, share and create a new ways. And I believe there's great untapped potentials in exploring how digital tools can help us better do so. And I'd be more than happy to discuss how we might do this together. Thank you. Are there any people that make your research possible? We actually don't hear that a lot. No. I mean, most of our research, I should probably thank all of you to the extent that you're taxpayers. We very much appreciate that as well. But also there are a lot of foundations in Denmark that generously support our work and we wouldn't exist without them. So for instance, some of the people who help finance our center, whenever you buy a window from Velux, some of that goes into public research. Whenever you drink a beer from Karlsberg, that funds research as well. So please buy more windows and drink more beer. Thank you.