The Relationship Between Contextual Cues in Virtual Environments and Creative Processes.

Because of the range of design possibilities they provide, virtual environments have a promising potential to support creative work. This article presents an experiment that explores the effects of contextual cues, provided in a virtual environment, on performance in a creative task. One hundred thirty-five participants completed a classical creativity task in one of three environments: a virtual creativity-conducive environment (CCE), comprising standardized elements identified from a survey as being characteristic of environments that support creativity, a real meeting room (real control environment), and its virtual replication (virtual control environment). Results show that participants produced more original ideas and explored idea categories in greater depth in the CCE than in the control conditions. These results were discussed in terms of research on creativity, priming, virtual environments, and of the design of workplaces.

Anticipating the use of future things: towards a framework for prospective use analysis in innovation design projects.

Anticipation of future product use is a persistent issue in User-Centered Design. In this paper, we argue that one obstacle to early integration of use analysis in innovation design is overreliance on retrospective use analysis, i.e. that which is based on clear references to existing products or activities. In contrast, innovation design projects are full of uncertainty, leading to a need for prospective analysis. After having described some limitations of prospective use analysis, we contend that creativity tools may be used to assist the anticipation of future product use, by allowing designers to approach the variability of situations of future use in a structured manner rather than by "muddling through". We illustrate the expected benefits of this approach with two case studies, and describe some prospects for future research and practice in ergonomics.

Pesticide exposure and sprayer design: ergonomics evaluation to reduce pesticide exposure.

Plant protection products are used in agriculture to improve yields, but this use can cause contamination of the environment and is also likely to have adverse short and long term effects on agricultural workers. This poster describes a systems approach to reducing the risk of operator exposure to plant protection products through the introduction of ergonomics to the design process of large agricultural sprayers.