What has creativity to do with IS (information systems)? Is it really possibly construct a platform that supports creativity? A State-of-Art research paper by Umer Farooq, John M. Carroll, and Craig H. Ganoe is worth reading. It is called: "Supporting Creativity in Distributed Scientific Communities". Available through ACM Portal or here.
Remember, when I complained about the lack of creativity research understanding in IS and usability research papers? This is not the case with their paper. Farooq, Carrol and Ganoe first provide a nice review of findings in the creativity, group interaction and CSCW literature.
Then they define 3 requirements for supporting creativity:
1. Support for divergent and convergent thinking
2. Development of shared objectives
3. Reflexivity.
I buy their requirements. Few comments:
- Within the first item, divergent and convergent thinking skills could be perhaps measured measured before using the system and tools/views could be tailored based on those test results. But then we are talking about adaptivity and adaptive systems (I personally experienced their difficulties while developing MOBIlearn)
- The second item, shared objectives, is not recognised in many creativity research papers and artifacts. I liked their comment "strong goal commitment is necessary to maintain group member persistence for implementation in the face of resistance among other organizational members".
- The third item, reflexivity, is similar to (critical) reflection. Centrality of experience, critical reflection, and rational discourse are all common themes in Mezirow's Transformational Learning theory.
Finally Farooq & Co suggest 3 design implications to support creativity in CSCW (my comments in blue):
1) Integrate support for individual, dyadic, and group brainstorming. Comment: This is tricky. Individual workspaces and tools have been traditionally missing from many groupware systems. I welcome the effort of Farooq &Co to address this. Brainstorming is just one technique and many researchers like Yrjö Engeström and Kalevi Rantanen see that the the context and object defines which techniques are suitable. Technical problems and TRIZ are good examples of alternative problem finding/solving techniques.
2) Leverage cognitive conflict by preserving and reflecting on minority dissent. Comment: This minority dissent was first difficult me to grasp. As Farooq & Co propose, the skeptic voices are important and these traces should be kept visible in the IS and there should discussion about them along the line.
3) Support flexibility in granularity of planning. Comment: Innovation is a systematic process. Journaling and planning processes (and tools) are elementary parts of creativity. As Csikszentmihalyi points are, creative people and groups are complex in their nature, they can shift from organised to disorganised when needed. Farooq, Carrroll and Ganoe point out that social networks and their management is a crucial part of creativity.
Is there something to add to this paper? Not much, the authors have been even wise to focus on scientific communities and not to claim that their findings can be generalised for the business world ;-) The Wiki artefact described in the paper is truly interesting, but the BRIDGE ourceforge project may be out of date? I have understood that authors are working with the next generation Citeseer, so, this fact may guide their work even more.
I am curious to hear more about the future work of Farooq, Carroll and Ganoe.
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