創造性支援環境

Japanese animation, or anime for short, has attracted global attention with its immense international growth. Despite its popularity, academic research has been limited to media studies, with grand questions like "what is anime," i.e., observational and analytical perspectives, and more recently in computer science from the perspective of "how to generate the anime look," focusing on representing visual characteristics with computer vision and machine learning methods.

This Special Interest Group (SIG) aims to deepen this multifaceted cultural phenomenon from multidisciplinary perspectives, including "who" makes anime, "how" creativity support tools can aid the process, and "what" about non-visual aspects like anime voices.

Organized by experts from industry and academia, this SIG invites participants to the emerging area of anime research and aims to open up a new alley for human-computer interaction (HCI) research through collective discussion on potential directions and community fostering of anime-interested researchers.

In contemporary capitalism, particularly in computer-science-related fields, capital-driven innovation tends to dominate discourse and decision-making. This model aligns with technosolutionism, the belief that technology alone can provide universal solutions. However, creative industries with deep cultural traditions, such as Japanese animation (anime), require a fundamentally different approach. These industries function as communities of practitioners united by a shared goal of producing high-quality creative work, yet they encompass a wide range of technical backgrounds. As a result, they need diverse socio-technical solutions, including tools that facilitate collaboration between different roles (e.g., artists and producers), user interfaces designed for expressivity rather than naïve usability, and support for hybrid analog-digital workflows.

Despite their cultural significance, these communities remain small compared to the vast user base of globally distributed products. Consequently, capital-driven efforts rarely prioritize dedicated solutions for them, reinforcing an asymmetrical power structure between toolmakers and users. While a few software engineers have supported practitioners, the community is still seeking a sustainable structure. Notably, because tools are a critical component in shaping culture and its evolution, such sustainable collaboration is also important for maintaining cultural diversity in a form decoupled from economic growth. This is where the academic community of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) can play a critical role.

A notable precedent is the collaboration between the 3D computer graphics (CG) animation industry and SIGGRAPH, where academia and industry jointly tackled computational challenges in CG. However, unlike CG, which lends itself to formalization as a purely technical research problem, the socio-technical complexities of creative industries often resist such reduction. This makes HCI an ideal partner, jointly building and deploying creativity-support tools with collaboration, professional use, and hybrid analog-digital workflows in mind. The resulting toolchain can be considered a new commons to be shared across the industry.

As researchers with experience in the animation industry and a deep interest in cultural circulation, we reflect on these challenges from both academic and industry perspectives. Creativity-support tools must be designed with an awareness of the cultural and professional contexts in which they are used, going beyond the Western-centric, economic-growth-driven focus. As a vision for post-growth HCI, we argue that fostering slow but steady collaborations between academia and creative industries has the potential to ensure that technological development supports sustainable, culturally embedded, and community-driven futures.

Research on creativity support tools (CSTs) has a long history in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI); however, researchers often focus on developing novel CSTs and verifying them in a controlled lab setting, rather than on capturing the creative process in the wild.

In reality, creative activity is exploratory, laborious, and involves multiple CSTs; which together form a creativity support environment or ecology. Creative activity is also social, cultural, and collaborative with people distributing, modifying, and reacting to the creations of others. This process can inspire subsequent iterations. To understand and support open-ended, culturally embedded, collaborative creativity, HCI researchers are seeking new methods to study the sociocultural aspects of creativity support.

This Special Interest Group on Creativity and Cultures in Computing (SIGCCC) invites diverse researchers to provide a forum for CST discussions from a wide sociocultural lens. The participants will identify and discuss the state-of-the-art and conceptualize future directions for creativity support research.

Research on creativity support tools in Human-Computer Interaction often focuses on novel interaction design, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

This article discusses the importance of helping creative activities "in the wild" through the author's experience of immersing himself in the creators' environment, talking to them to understand their needs, and revealing the rich history via multidisciplinary studies.

It highlights two case studies: TextAlive, developing an AI-enabled creativity support environment for authoring and distributing lyric videos and apps, and Griffith, developing a web-based storyboarding tool.

These examples emphasize the need for a slow-paced yet in-depth research process that blends technological innovation with a deep appreciation of the cultural contexts of the creative process.