Mosaic: Designing Online Creative Communities for Sharing Works-in-Progress
This addresses a problem for illustrators and creative professionals by providing a collaborative environment for process-oriented sharing, though it is incremental in focusing on a specific community design.
The paper tackled the challenge of sharing in-progress creative work in online communities by proposing Mosaic, a community where illustrators share work-in-progress snapshots, resulting in artists reflecting on their process, developing norms for detailed feedback, and reducing apprehension about sharing early versions.
Online creative communities allow creators to share their work with a large audience, maximizing opportunities to showcase their work and connect with fans and peers. However, sharing in-progress work can be technically and socially challenging in environments designed for sharing completed pieces. We propose an online creative community where sharing process, rather than showcasing outcomes, is the main method of sharing creative work. Based on this, we present Mosaic---an online community where illustrators share work-in-progress snapshots showing how an artwork was completed from start to finish. In an online deployment and observational study, artists used Mosaic as a vehicle for reflecting on how they can improve their own creative process, developed a social norm of detailed feedback, and became less apprehensive of sharing early versions of artwork. Through Mosaic, we argue that communities oriented around sharing creative process can create a collaborative environment that is beneficial for creative growth.