CCS Members

Shigeki Amitani worked on several projects during his time with CCS between 2004-2009, including the “Our Content” project. The core is a generative website with a story-generation engine that weaves video clips posted by public audiences into “stories” by combining them based on annotations so that people can enjoy dynamic contents that changes each time when they visit. The key creative question is what is the nature of the content to be made on the server, the interface that facilitates user engagement and, the overall narrative experience. We consider that generative systems are useful and effective for public audiences of video-posting websites. The target users do not necessarily have specific videos that they want to watch. Rather, they are looking for and expecting "something interesting".

Shigeki Amitani started his academic career in creativity support from his MS course at AI Laboratory, University of Tokyo, including 1 year study at Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet (NTNU). He has concentrated on the development of creativity support tools, based on microscopic analysis of human cognitive processes.

The focus in his master course was on the process of musical composition and the development of representations to support the process.

His PhD dissertation concentrated on a method and a system for supporting the process of knowledge creation in order to apply theoretical frameworks for knowledge creation to the real world design problems.

While a sequence of information, such as scenario, has been regarded as a powerful tool for developing strategies and communicating contexts, few studies have been conducted for semi-automatic scenario generation for making plausible scenarios, especially out of consumer generated media. Through literature reviews in knowledge management and knowledge creation, and informal communications with people at a Japanese advertising, we identified generating sequences of information is one of the most suitable methods for stimulating human creative activities. This research opens up a new platform for both public audiences and information designers.
The contribution to the broader community of the research field is that this work provides an empirical proof of the concept "a computer as a stimulant" (Edmonds 2000). Humans naturally share knowledge by telling stories, sequences of information. This is a form of knowledge exchange and of organising our experiences (Garvey 1977). This is one concrete example that shows how sequences of information, usually referred as scenarios, storytelling, contexts, etc., could be stimulants for human creative activities. 

publications and more details: http://shigekifactory.com