Mosaic: Designing Online Creative Communities for Sharing Works-in-Progress

TL;DR

Mosaic is an online community platform that encourages sharing work-in-progress art, fostering reflection, detailed feedback, and reducing apprehension among illustrators, thereby enhancing collaborative creative growth.

Contribution

This paper introduces Mosaic, a novel online community designed specifically for sharing creative processes, which promotes reflection and collaborative feedback among artists.

Findings

Artists used Mosaic to reflect on their work process.

Community norms of detailed feedback emerged.

Artists became less apprehensive about sharing early work.

Abstract

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.