Creativity and HCI: From Experience to Design in Education - Selected Contributions from HCIEd 2007, March 29-30, 2007, Aveiro, Portugal (Hardcover, 2009 ed.)

In thispa per, we describe the key lessons from an earlier HCI Educators' conference, held in Limerick in 2006, on 'inventivity' - a term coined to highlight the confluence of inventiveness and creativ ity. There is a distinction between being creative andbein g artistic. HCI education, in terms of creative inventiveness, is not just about artistically pleasing user inte rfaces, but also about solutions that are innovative. We can know much about creativ ity and inventiveness. However, tobe able to teach and train students so that th ey can be creatively inventive, we believe that it would be helpful if educators themselves have personally experienced this. With this in mind, we organised the follow up conference HCIEd 2007 Creativity: Experiencing to Educate and Design. Inventivity was coined to refer to the notiono f inventing creative and innovative solutions. This term was also intended tomean that such solutionsb e more than 'creative', artistic or appealing interfaces as designed by artistic or 'creative types' of people. It was also intended to reflect the creativeness of the solutions that had to be invented. One reason for emphasising this as pect at the conference was that, in HCI design it is easy to mis interpret the focus ofHCI d esign solutions - which should notad dress just visualisation and interaction design, but also address how that visualisation and interactioncreativ ely repr esents and simplifies the complexities in work thatpe ople engage in.