Publication Details

Download

Otmar Hilliges, Lucia Terrenghi, Sebastian Boring, David Kim, Hendrik Richter, Andreas Butz
Designing for Collaborative Creative Problem Solving
In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Creativity & Cognition, Washington D.C., USA, June 13-15, 2007 (bib)

Collaborative creativity is traditionally supported by formal techniques, such as brainstorming. These techniques improve the idea-generation process by creating group synergies, but also suffer from a number of negative effects. Current electronic tools to support collaborative creativity overcome some of these problems, but introduce new ones, by either losing the benefits of face-to-face communication or losing the immediacy of simultaneous contribution. Using an instrumented environment as a test bed, we are investigating how collaborative creativity can be supported electronically while maintaining face-to-face communication. What are the design factors that influence such a system? We have designed a brainstorming application that uses an interactive table and a large wall display, and compared the results of using it to traditional paper-based brainstorming in a user study with 30 participants. From the considerations that went into the design and the observations during the study we derive a number of design guidelines for collaborative systems in instrumented environments.