Supporting creativity with awareness in distributed collaboration

Abstract

Based on qualitative analysis of three groups collaborating on a research task in a distributed setting, we identify four breakdowns in creativity: (1) Minority ideas were under-considered; (2) Novel ideas were easily lost; (3) There was a lack of critical evaluation of perspectives; (4) Reflexivity was weak during convergence. We propose two design strategies, illustrated with mock-ups, to support creativity with awareness: (1) Automatically summarize and recommend ideational activities from system logs; (2) Allow collaborators to enter status of work activity, making these activity updates visible on social and temporal dimensions. Our analysis also suggests an integrated framework of metrics to evaluate creativity as a long-term collaborative activity.