OBJECTIVES

Many researchers have highlighted the connection between attention and creativity. The Web 
environment significantly affects the manner in which we allocate attention to information, 
tasks, and people. This workshop addresses the question of what impact this has on creative 
pursuits. We look at creativity at many levels, from personal creativity (e.g. the different 
ways in which a student may solve a problem) to big-C creativity that generates new high impact 
findings. We concentrate on the effects that the Web environment has on on human attention and 
on all these types of creativity. In particular, we will focus on empirical/experimental as 
well as conceptual research connecting topics such as: new types of creativity enabled by the 
web; the influence of Web-based environments on human attention; cognitive offload and its 
consequences; group creativity; creativity outsourcing.

INTRODUCTION

We are living in the age defined by innovation driven economy. The ubiquity of the web in our 
lives (work and leisure time) forces us to reconsider our fundamental preconceptions regarding 
the creative and innovation processes. The complexity and the requirements of this new environment 
tell us that the age of the lone asocial romanticist genius is gone. Collaboration and collective 
creation is a must. Does the web facilitates these processes? And, if so,then in what way? What 
can we do to take advantage of what the web offers? How does it affect individuals? What are the 
consequences for education?

All these questions have prompted an unprecedented academic interest on creativity that is well 
represented by several academic meeting such as the International ACM Conference on Creativity 
and Cognition 2013 in Sydney, the AAAI 2013 Spring Symposium on Creativity and Cognitive 
Development in Stanford, the Mobile Learning and Creativity Workshop in Saarbrücken (September 
2012), and the Creative Web Symposium: Computational Creativity as a Web-Service in South Corea 
(December 2012). Our workshop, while aligning with the meetings above, aims at exploring more 
specific issues of creativity that are immediately related to the particular environment created 
by the Web.

Every new medium introduces new creative opportunities and shortens the path from the creator to 
the consumer: from the invention of writing, the printing process, photography, movies, to the 
radio and TV, the telephone, digital computer to the current era of hyper connectivity, always-on, 
instant messaging, instant content producing and sharing. Unprecedented amount of all humane 
knowledge becomes easily available for many and our expectations of others (individuals and 
institutions) in terms of reactivity, productivity and efficiency is raised. Some researchers 
believe that the more constraints we have to overcome, the easier it becomes to create. Would 
then democratization of access to information and cheap communication actually lessen creativity, 
or reduce it to trivial creations?

On the other hand, creative behaviour has been connected with breath of attention
 (e.g. Kasof 1997, Friedman et al. 2003) and in general, wide attention deployment and defocused 
attention are considered to lead to greater creativity. Several researchers share the view that 
creativity requires variations in the field of attention (Gabora 2007, Vartanian 2009) and some 
experimental results hint that distractions improve creativity (Baird et al. 2012; Gallate et al. 
2012). Based on these considerations one could expect that forced changes in attention focus such 
as those generated by many Web 2.0 applications, may actually improve creativity. However, 
previous research also tells us of other related factors that may intervene with a possible 
negative effect. For example it has been observed that stress or arousal, generated for example by time pressure or evaluation apprehension, may reduce breadth of attention and therefore hinder creativity (Karau and Kelly 1992; Smith, Michael, and Hocevar 1990); that interruptions are more likely to hinder, rather than improve, creativity, and that different types
of interruptions may have varying degree of impact on different creative activities (Roda et al. 
2013).

CALL FOR PAPERS AND DEMONSTRATIONS

In this half-day workshop we invite researchers and practitioners for an exploration of the 
influence of the Web environment on human attention and creativity. We welcome short papers 
reporting empirical/experimental as well as conceptual research connecting topics such as:

New types of creativity enabled by the web
The influence of Web based environments on human attention
Cognitive offload and its consequences
Group creativity
Creativity outsourcing

We invite full papers (8 pages), short / position papers (2-4 pages), and/or demonstrations to 
be submitted to gstojanov@aup.edu by March 29

Demonstrations should be available online and be accompanied by a short description (no more 
than 2 pages).

All submissions will be reviewed by three members of the Program Committee.

We will pursue the possibility of publishing a selected number of papers in the special issue 
of a journal.

IMPORTANT DATES
Papers/Demo due March 29 2013
Review feedback April 5 2013
Workshop May 1st 2013

ORGANISATION

Organising committee

Georgi Stojanov - The American University of Paris (France)
Claudia Roda - The American University of Paris (France)
Bipin Indurkhya - International Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (India) and AGH University
of Science and Technology, Cracow (Poland)

Program committee

Sandra Bruno, Université de Cergy-Pontoise
Jayson P. Harsin, The American University of Paris
Thomas Kirste, University of Rostock
Mohammad Majid al-Rifaie, Goldsmiths' College, University of London
Amitash Ohja International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
Sebastian Pannasch, Technische Universitaet Dresden
Goran Trajkovski, Virginia International University
Giovanni Vincenti, Towson University
Sharon Wood, University of Sussex