C&C

The history of the human race is one of increasing intellectual capability. There has been a steady development and accretion of new tools for intellectual work and an increasing distribution of complex activities among many minds. Despite the transcendence of human cognition beyond what is inside a person's head, many approaches in education and many studies and frameworks for cognition and creativity have disregarded the social, physical, and artifactual surroundings in which creativity, cognition and human activities in general take place.

The Creativity & Cognition 2007 program is focused on the theme of cultivating and sustaining creativity: understanding how to design and evaluate computational support tools, digital media, and socio-technical environments that not only empower our creative processes and abilities, but encourage and nurture creative mindsets and lifestyles.

We received 104 paper submissions and we were able to accept 24 full papers. The constraint imposed by the single-track nature of the conference did not allow us to accept some papers that certainly would have proved interesting, but at the same time it ensured the selection of rigorous and innovative papers. The selected papers reflect the research work of scholars and practitioners from 9 different countries: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States.

The variety of disciplines, schools, and departments represented by the authors is rich and overwhelming. It includes contributions from the following disciplines: art & design, art & technology, interactive media, creative industries, human-computer interaction, informatics, computer science, engineering, cognitive science, psychology, architecture, archeology, visual arts, communication, and finally aesthetics. Many articles are grounded on multi-disciplinary collaboration and offer novel perspectives on narrative research, community engagement, and policy alternatives.

It is interesting to observe the number of papers with a focus on topics related to music (section "Music"). These papers represent the many others that we were not able to accept and looked at music as a privileged domain for a novel understanding of creative engagement and instrumental expertise. Such issues of instrumentality and materiality are echoed in other papers with a major focus on tools, media, and environments for education and collaboration (sections "Education" and "Collaboration Models"). Issues of narrative and representation are addressed by papers describing systems and interfaces for data visualization, information discovery and content creation, and for supporting, sharing, and disseminating creative activities and results (sections "Creating and Sharing" and "Support Tools"). Finally, issues of design methodology and evaluation are addressed by case studies and ethnographic accounts ranging from industrial design to everyday design (section "Design Methods").

The Demonstrations and Poster papers draw attention to promising new work that amply represents the breadth of the conference. Over 30 submissions were received of which we were able to accept less than half due to space constraints. The strength of this exciting part of the conference adds an important dynamic during which delegates can engage directly with tools and works focused on creativity.

We list students' contributions to reflect the lively and multidisciplinary environment of ideas and future research expressed by the Graduate Student Symposium.

The goal of the CC2007 proceedings is to create an archive of high-quality research papers and practical experiences, as well as a lively forum for community building. In selecting research papers for Creativity & Cognition 2007, we emphasized relevance and rigor, in the belief that design problems (broadly defined) are unique, and replicability and generalizability may be at times counter-productive objectives for design and creativity research. We tried to tackle this trade-off and promote community building by considering and balancing relevance and rigor.