Creative Evaluation

Paper

Georgios Marentakis, David Pirrò, Marian Weger

In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, pages 853–864. ACM, 2017.

Abstract

Interactive systems are traditionally evaluated against an 'intended' use by involving external participants. This approach has been challenged recently because of difficulties in addressing applications without an `intended' use or an 'intended' interpretation, but also because the propositionality of the evaluation medium may not address the aesthetics of interactive systems sufficiently. We turn our attention to the evaluation of interactive art, in which, although both difficulties emerge, traditional evaluation methods are commonly used. In trying to stay open to interpretation and address aesthetic thinking and knowledge, we introduce and apply creative evaluation. Ten artists were asked to both direct themselves enacting their interaction experience and to express it using artistic media. Inspiration was obtained in two interactive installations. The results of this experiment demonstrate the ability of artistic practice to maintain interpretation variability and its capacity to address aesthetic thinking and knowledge in the evaluation of interactive systems.

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