Visualizing Computer Activity to Support the Resumption of Long-term Creative Work

Abstract

Creative projects can span weeks, months, or even years. Working on these timescales can be difficult due to the need to restore context - a task's physical, digital, and mental resources - after each break. Prior research on using computers to restore context has focused on digital context, reopening collections of documents or visualizing interactions with a single program. My research explores how visualizing system-wide activity can help people restore the mental context of creative work.