HMI is Important in Creative Processes

The Value of Being Creative

Human brains are exceptionally able to process abstract ideas, and that is the premise to say that we human are conscious, intellectual, or emotional, distinguishing us from other kinds of objects in the world.

Therefore, to appreciate and make most use of the rare ability we’re granted with, we should put most of our efforts in the realm of concepts, like, be creative, and give those “low-level and trivial chores” to machines.

Example: Mind Music to Waveform

Usually, being creative in the conceptual level isn’t enough to make the whole story. You have to realize the idea.

Assume you’re creative in music, that is, your mind often generate good music in itself and you really enjoy it. However, to accurately share the music to others or to store it for other days, you have to decode the mind music into a physical wave. There are several ways:

1. The dumbest way is to somehow imagine the waveform in your mind and engrave it on a disc or a waveform editor such as Audacity. That is hard because you deal with the waveform directly with your human mind, but the waveform is very mechanical and not native to human.
2. A more elegant way is to draw notes on a piano roll, and rely on a synth to turn it into a waveform. This two-step decoding scheme is easier to use as the synth lift the human-machine-interface to the level of musical notes, which is more native to human.
3. Similarly, pressing keys on a piano is also interacting with a note level HMI, if you’re not trained to play a piano.
4. If you’ve received enough training on playing a piano, you do not just “press keys”, instead, you run ideas and of emotions in mind and let your fingers automatically transform them into key presses, without having to consciously think about individual notes. That means you’ll experience an HMI of an even higher level.

We’ve seen 3 levels of HMI for producing music and their corresponding UX.

• Level 1: waveform editor
• Level 2: note level
• Level 3:

So what is the importance of a human-native HMI?

Assume your mind music emerges at the rate of 100bpm. With