Special Assignment: Dr. Celine Latulipe

Summary
Dr. Celine Latulipe gave a talk titled Building and Evaluating Creative Interaction. Today, any technology involving the hands is designed with the dominant hand in mind, while the other hand plays a supporting or cursory role. She introduced two drawing and image-editing applications called symDraw and symTone, which feature two gyroscopic mouse that actually take advantage of both hands and give them equal roles. In symTone, tones, colors and resizing are performed using both mice to define the desired area and edit it simultaneously. This is in contrast to most current installations, where a single mouse is used to define the area in one mode and edit it in another mode.

In the second half of her talk, she introduced a new survey metric, the Creativity Support Index (CSI), similar to the NASA Task Load Index (TLX). This metric was designed to help researchers and designers evaluate the level of creativity support of a computer system or interface and its impact on cognitive load. She is also researching biometrics or galvanic skin response (GSR) for people in performing arts to gauge their audiences' reactions to their performances.

Discussion
I thought the entire talk was very interesting. With symDraw and symTone, Latulipe did mention that users typically spent a minute or so getting used to holding two mice simultaneously. Her research in evaluation factoring was more interesting still and I am eager to learn more about it.