Manifesting Creativity in Virtual World Building: A Case Study in Gather
Authors: 
Celine Latulipe, 
Hussein Agoushi, Min Kyu Jung, Lena Le, Shauna Mallory-Hill, Martin Popper, Jason ShieldsAuthors Info & Claims
Celine Latulipe, Hussein Agoushi, Min Kyu Jung, Lena Le, Shauna Mallory-Hill, Martin Popper, Jason ShieldsAuthors Info & ClaimsPages 298 - 304
Abstract
The environmental design field has established methodologies for designing indoor and outdoor environments and developed best practices for designing spaces to support human creativity. Thoring et al. have systematized current knowledge around the design of spaces in the physical world to facilitate creative processes into a series of ten propositions [47]. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in the use of online spatial platforms to support virtual co-working. How to design virtual workplaces to support various creative processes is an emergent and open question. Thus, we present an initial exploration of the opportunities and constraints we confronted while attempting to manifest Thoring et al.’s ten propositions for creative facilitation in Gather [9], a 2D virtual world platform.
References
[1]
Adobe. 2023. Official Adobe Photoshop - Photo & D=design software. https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[2]
Austin Cory Bart. 2022. Let’s Learn Algorithms with AlgoTutorBot! An Entire Course as an Educational Escape Room. In Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2. 1178–1178.
[3]
Ruizhi Cheng, Nan Wu, Matteo Varvello, Songqing Chen, and Bo Han. 2022. Are We Ready for Metaverse? A Measurement Study of Social Virtual Reality Platforms. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference (Nice, France) (IMC ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 504–518. https://doi.org/10.1145/3517745.3561417
[4]
Erin Cherry and Celine Latulipe. 2014. Quantifying the creativity support of digital tools through the creativity support index. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 21, 4 (2014), 1–25.
[5]
Nai-Wen Chi, Hsueh-Hua Liao, and Wan-Ling Chien. 2021. Having a creative day: A daily diary study of the interplay between daily activating moods and physical work environment on daily creativity. The Journal of Creative Behavior 55, 3 (2021), 752–768.
[6]
Paradowski Creative. 2020. Apart | Paradowski Creative. https://paradowski.com/work/apart. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[7]
Scott Doorley, Scott Witthoft, 2012. Make space: How to set the stage for creative collaboration. John Wiley & Sons.
[8]
Jan Dul, Canan Ceylan, and Ferdinand Jaspers. 2011. Knowledge workers’ creativity and the role of the physical work environment. Human resource management 50, 6 (2011), 715–734.
[9]
Gather. 2022. Gather | Building better teams, bit by bit. https://www.gather.town/. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[10]
Fabio Genz, Niklas Fuchs, Daniel Kolb, Simone Müller, and Dieter Kranzlmüller. 2021. Evaluation of Proprietary Social VR Platforms for Use in Distance Learning. In Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Computer Graphics: 8th International Conference, AVR 2021, Virtual Event, September 7–10, 2021, Proceedings 8. Springer, 462–480.
[11]
Carlos Gonzalez Diaz, John Tang, Advait Sarkar, and Sean Rintel. 2022. Making Space for Social Time: Supporting Conversational Transitions Before, During, and After Video Meetings. In 2022 Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work. 1–11.
[12]
Naomi Jane Jacobs and Joseph Lindley. 2021. Room for Improvement in the Video Conferencing ‘Space’. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research (2021).
[13]
Tingting Jiang, Zixuan Wang, and Kostas Terzidis. 2022. Reimagining “Space”: An Approach to Increase Participants’ Social Aspects During Online Conferencing. In Human-Computer Interaction. User Experience and Behavior: Thematic Area, HCI 2022, Held as Part of the 24th HCI International Conference, HCII 2022, Virtual Event, June 26–July 1, 2022, Proceedings, Part III. Springer, 128–144.
[14]
Marcel Jonas, Steven Said, Daniel Yu, Chris Aiello, Nicholas Furlo, and Douglas Zytko. 2019. Towards a taxonomy of social vr application design. In Extended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts. 437–444.
[15]
Phil Jones, Tess Osborne, Calla Sullivan-Drage, Natasha Keen, and Eleanor Gadsby. 2022. FOUR: Working with social VR. Policy Press, Bristol, UK, 75 – 97. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781447360773.ch004
[16]
James C Kaufman and Ronald A Beghetto. 2009. Beyond big and little: The four c model of creativity. Review of general psychology 13, 1 (2009), 1–12.
[17]
Andruid Kerne. 2002. Concept-context-design: A creative model for the development of interactivity. In Proceedings of the 4th conference on Creativity & Cognition. 192–199.
[18]
Andruid Kerne, Andrew M Webb, Steven M Smith, Rhema Linder, Nic Lupfer, Yin Qu, Jon Moeller, and Sashikanth Damaraju. 2014. Using metrics of curation to evaluate information-based ideation. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI) 21, 3 (2014), 1–48.
[19]
Kumospace. 2023. Virtual Office Software for Teams & Events - Kumospace. https://www.kumospace.com/. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[20]
Celine Latulipe and Amy De Jaeger. 2022. Comparing Student Experiences of Collaborative Learning in Synchronous CS1 Classes in Gather.Town vs. Zoom. In Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 1 (Providence, RI, USA) (SIGCSE 2022). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 411–417. https://doi.org/10.1145/3478431.3499383
[21]
Celine Latulipe and Deborah Turnbull Tillman. 2022. Curating Interactive Art for Online Conferences: Artist, Curator and Technologist Experiences in Gather. Town. In Creativity and Cognition. 380–391.
[22]
Joseph Lindley, Miriam Sturdee, David Philip Green, and Hayley Alter. 2021. This is Not a Paper: Applying a Design Research lens to video conferencing, publication formats, eggs… and other things. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–6.
[23]
Qiaoxi Liu and Anthony Steed. 2021. Social virtual reality platform comparison and evaluation using a guided group walkthrough method. Frontiers in Virtual Reality 2 (2021), 668181.
[24]
Barbara A Manko. 2021. Considerations in the use of work-from-home (wfh) for post-pandemic planning and management. Management 25, 1 (2021), 118–140.
[25]
Yuri Martens. 2011. Creative workplace: instrumental and symbolic support for creativity. Facilities 29, 1/2 (2011), 63–79.
[26]
Joshua McVeigh-Schultz and Katherine Isbister. 2021. The case for “weird social” in VR/XR: A vision of social superpowers beyond meatspace. In Extended abstracts of the 2021 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 1–10.
[27]
Martin Meinel, Lukas Maier, Timm Wagner, and Kai-Ingo Voigt. 2017. Designing creativity-enhancing workspaces: A critical look at empirical evidence. Journal of technology and innovation management 1, 1 (2017).
[28]
Meta. 2023. Horizon Worlds | Virtual Reality Worlds and Communities. https://www.meta.com/horizon-worlds/. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[29]
Midjourney. 2023. Midjourney. https://www.midjourney.com/home. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[30]
Milad Mirbabaie, Lennart Hofeditz, and Leon Schmid. 2022. Potentials for Design and Application of Virtual and Augmented Reality Technologies in Coworking Spaces. HMD Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik (2022), 1–18.
[31]
Ghasem Motalebi and Avishan Parvaneh. 2021. The effect of physical work environment on creativity among artists’ residencies. Facilities 39, 13/14 (2021), 911–923.
[32]
Mozilla. 2022. 5 Inspiring Galleries Built with Hubs. https://paradowski.com/work/apart. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[33]
ohyay. 2023. ohyay - the best virtual events. https://ohyay.co/. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[34]
Emma M Op den Kamp, Arnold B Bakker, Maria Tims, and Evangelia Demerouti. 2020. Proactive vitality management and creative work performance: The role of self-insight and social support. The Journal of Creative Behavior 54, 2 (2020), 323–336.
[35]
Paul B Paulus, Jared B Kenworthy, and Laura R Marusich. 2021. Alone versus together: Finding the right balance for creativity. The handbook of solitude: Psychological perspectives on social isolation, social withdrawal, and being alone (2021), 268–279.
[36]
Nicholas Polys, Samridhi Roshan, Emily Newton, Muskaan Narula, and Bao-Tran Thai. 2022. Designing for Social Interactions in a Virtual Art Gallery. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on 3D Web Technology (Evry-Courcouronnes, France) (Web3D ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 11, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3564533.3564562
[37]
Remo. 2023. Remo - The Virtual Experience Platform. https://remo.co/. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[38]
Christian Remy, Lindsay MacDonald Vermeulen, Jonas Frich, Michael Mose Biskjaer, and Peter Dalsgaard. 2020. Evaluating Creativity Support Tools in HCI Research. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (Eindhoven, Netherlands) (DIS ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 457–476. https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395474
[39]
Mark A Runco. 2004. Everyone has creative potential.American Psychological Association.
[40]
Kerstin Sailer. 2011. Creativity as social and spatial process. Facilities 29, 1/2 (2011), 6–18.
[41]
Ben Shneiderman, Gerhard Fischer, Mary Czerwinski, Mitch Resnick, Brad Myers, Linda Candy, Ernest Edmonds, Mike Eisenberg, Elisa Giaccardi, Tom Hewett, 2006. Creativity support tools: Report from a US National Science Foundation sponsored workshop. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 20, 2 (2006), 61–77.
[42]
Paul J Silvia, Roger E Beaty, Emily C Nusbaum, Kari M Eddington, Holly Levin-Aspenson, and Thomas R Kwapil. 2014. Everyday creativity in daily life: An experience-sampling study of “little c” creativity.Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 8, 2 (2014), 183.
[43]
Anastasia Sinitsyna, Mina Di Marino, and Tiiu Paas. 2022. Virtual coworking and remote working: Lessons and perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic from Estonia and Norway. In The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of Working Spaces. Routledge, 153–164.
[44]
Sococo. 2020. Home - Sococo | Online Workplace for Distributed Teams. https://www.sococo.com/. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[45]
Jaeyoon Song, Christoph Riedl, and Thomas W Malone. 2021. Online mingling: supporting ad hoc, private conversations at virtual conferences. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–10.
[46]
Spot. 2023. Spot | Virtual office for teams. https://www.spotvirtual.com/en. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[47]
Katja Thoring, Milene Gonçalves, Roland M Mueller, Pieter Desmet, and Petra Badke-Schaub. 2021. The architecture of creativity: Toward a causal theory of creative workspace design. International Journal of Design 15, 2 (2021), 17–36.
[48]
Topia. 2022. Topia - Increase Engagement & Participation. https://topia.io/. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[49]
Rex van der Spuy. 2017. Using Tiled Editor. The Advanced Game Developer’s Toolkit: Create Amazing Web-based Games with JavaScript and HTML5 (2017), 5–34.
[50]
VRChat. 2023. VRChat. https://hello.vrchat.com/. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[51]
Welo. 2023. Make virtual interactions more human.https://www.welo.space/. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
[52]
Tariq Zaman, David Lim, Isaac Makosa, Naska Goagoses, Erkki Rötkönen, Helvi Itenge, Daniel Yong Wen Tan, Sydney Mutelo, and Heike Winschiers-Theophilus. 2022. A children-created virtual learning space station. In ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences. 241–244.
[53]
Samaneh Zamanifard and Guo Freeman. 2023. A Surprise Birthday Party In VR: Leveraging Social Virtual Reality To Maintain Existing Close Ties Over Distance. In Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity: 18th International Conference, IConference 2023, Virtual Event, March 13–17, 2023, Proceedings, Part II. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 268–285. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_23
[54]
ZEP. 2022. ZEP. https://zep.us/. Accessed: 2023-04-14.
Index Terms
- Manifesting Creativity in Virtual World Building: A Case Study in Gather
Recommendations
Collaborative Online Learning with VR Video: Roles of Collaborative Tools and Shared Video Control
CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsVirtual Reality (VR) has a noteworthy educational potential by providing immersive and collaborative environments. As an alternative but cost-effective way of delivering realistic environments in VR, using 360-degree videos in immersive VR (VR videos) ...
A Preliminary Study of World Customizability for Virtual Reality Co-Play
CHI EA '23: Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsCooperative play, or “co-play”, is the act of playing with others in a co-located setting, including co-location of avatars in virtual reality (VR). Customizability is the degree to which play artifacts like props can be changed to suit different needs, ...
How Will VR Enter University Classrooms? Multi-stakeholders Investigation of VR in Higher Education
CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsVR has received increased attention as an educational tool and many argue it is destined to influence educational practices, especially with the emergence of the Metaverse. Most prior research on educational VR reports on applications or systems ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
June 2023
564 pages
ISBN:9798400701801
DOI:10.1145/3591196
Copyright © 2023 Owner/Author.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 19 June 2023
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Poster
- Research
- Refereed limited
Conference
C&C '23
Sponsor:
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 108 of 371 submissions, 29%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 157Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)50
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
Reflects downloads up to 02 Mar 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign inFull Access
View options
View or Download as a PDF file.
PDFeReader
View online with eReader.
eReaderHTML Format
View this article in HTML Format.
HTML Format