Scaffolds for Dialogic Creativity

Abstract: Creative problem-solving requires both exploratory and evaluative thinking skills. The contextual, open-ended nature of creative tasks makes them uniquely challenging to teach and learn. Experts use reflective dialogue with themselves and others to explore alternatives and evaluate ideas. My dissertation investigates scaffolds to help novices similarly engage in dialogic creativity. I do this through adaptive interventions that make abstraction more concrete in three areas of the creative process: 1) Role-playing and perspective-taking to frame problem-solving and ideation, 2) adaptive suggestions for exploring early-stage decisions in creative tasks, and 3) interactive guidance for improving creative feedback. Essentially, my work aims to help novices see the high-level forest from the low-level trees.

Bio: Tricia Ngoon is a Ph.D candidate in Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego advised by Scott Klemmer. Her research interests span psychology, computer science, and education to better understand creative cognition. She received a bachelor’s degree in Psychology with Honors from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked at Stanford University in cognitive neuroscience. She has interned with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Adobe Research. Her work has received Best Paper Honorable Mention awards at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).