Towards Enabling Synchronous Digital Creative Collaboration: Codifying Conflicts in Co-Coloring

Humans are unique in working collaboratively by sharing and understanding intentions. However, digital collaboration is daunting, especially in creative design life cycles, due to non-linear workflows and lack of micro-alignments coupled with the need for robust network connectivity. We present a formative study with creatives to identify key themes in conflicts that arise in this space. We introduce CollabColor, a user interface that aids in resolving conflicts for two users synchronously collaborating on a low-touch creative task. More specifically, given an uncolored line-art on a canvas and a set of reference images from the users as input, we arrive at design goals for an intelligent system that can enhance our interface. We find that such a system must provide non-obtrusive interventions during real-time collaboration to ensure that the final colorization of the art is coherent, and all the users’ aligned preferences are incorporated.