The Human-Computer Interaction community has long been concerned with design. Terms such as `creativity' and `innovation' are frequently used when referring to the design process and in this paper we examine what creativity is with respect to design. Design is often a collaborative and, therefore, a social activity. We review the evolution of definitions of creativity, leading to our proposal of a unified definition, we present a theoretical account of why social creativity should in principle be more productive than individual creativity. We explain findings to the contrary in terms of three social influences on creativity and suggest that research in supporting design should focus on mitigating the effects of these social influences on the creativity of design teams.

In this paper, we first describe a formative empirical study to inform the design of CSCW tools to support idea finding in co-located groups. Groups of students worked on creative problems with mapping and whiteboard tools in different work modes. Concluding from the results of the study, requirements are derived. A suite of tools that are informed by these requirements is presented along with typical scenarios of their usage. The suite consists of three software components covering a Mind-Mapping system (BeachMap), a novel interaction technique for successive bottom-up structuring of ideas (MagNets), and a PDA tool for asynchronous idea generation "on the road" (PalmBeach).

Creative products are generally recognised as satisfying two requirements: firstly they are useful, and secondly they are novel. Much effort in AI and design computing has been put into developing systems that can recognise the usefulness of the products that they generate. In contrast, the work presented in this thesis has concentrated on developing computational systems that are able to recognise the novelty of their work. The research has shown that when computational systems are given the ability to recognise both the novelty and the usefulness of their products they gain a level of autonomy that opens up new possibilities for the study of creative behaviour in single agents and the emergence of social creativity in multi-agent systems. The work

ii Designing the new intranet is about exploiting web technology in an organisational context so that the users can better utilise the intranet from a knowledge management perspective. This means to take advantage of the specific features that characterise web technology, to take advantage of the tangible traces of everyday work activities, and to take advantage of the fact that actions on an intranet are not isolated events. The pervading theme in this thesis is how to design the intranet to activate the users rather than a preoccupation with technology per se. The ambition has been to understand why intranets are being underutilised and to influence the way intranets are understood. Another objective has been to design a new framework for intranet implementations in general and for knowledge creation and knowledge sharing in particular. The research described in this thesis has taken place in an industrial environment and in close collaboration with the members of the organisation under study. The results apply to and are relevant to large and/or geographically disperse organisations, where the members do not know or know of each other and the organisation as a whole does not know what it knows. Further, leveraging the knowledge of the employees becomes increasingly important in the post-industrial society, where organisations depend on networks, co-operation, and openness to achieve a competitive edge. This thesis consists of five papers and a framing introduction. Papers 1, 2, and 3 deal with enacted knowledge and competence, whereas papers 4 and 5 are targeted towards innovation and knowledge creation. The introduction places the papers in a context and presents the contributions; (1) the application prototypes, (2) the papers, and (3) the intranet design framework.

One form of group support system that has received much attention from cross-disciplinary research is electronic brainstorming (EBS). While it is generally held that group cohesiveness is lower in virtual settings that in face-to-face interactions, it has also been argued that this does not matter in cognitive work such as idea generation. However, most work on EBS has been carried out in academic settings, and though such environments provide more control, they may be insufficient to capture all nuances of on-going office work. Hence, I describe an action case study of a failing attempt to introduce an EBS prototype in an organisational setting. The analysis suggests that virtual groups, counter to what is previously thought, need to establish and maintain a group identity. One circumstance under which this seems to be the case is in the existence of extrinsic rewards mechanisms.

In this paper, we present a qualitative case study of group creativity online in the domain of mathematics. We define creative work broadly, ranging from the micro-level coconstruction of novel resources for problem solving to the innovative reuse of ideas and solution strategies across virtual teams. We analyze the collaborative interactions of virtual math teams with an emphasis on describing the relationship between "synchronic " aspects of creative work (i.e. single episode interactions) and their "diachronic" evolution across time and across collectivities. Our analysis indicates that the synergy between these two types of interactions and the resulting creative engagement of the teams relies on three fundamental processes: (1) referencing and the “configuration of indexicals”, (2) collective remembering, and (3) bridging across discontinuities. In addition we also reflect on the aspects of the online environment used by these virtual teams which promote, support or hinder diachronic and synchronic interactions and creativity as aspects of group cognition.

Creativity is a vital component of problem solving, yet despite decades of creativity research, many of the techniques for increasing creative production still lack compelling theoretical and causal foundations. This paper defines a Cognitive Network Model, a causal model of creative solution generation for problem solving domains. This model is grounded in mechanisms of human cognition which are hypothesized to exist within all individuals, regardless of their intelligence level, socio-economic status, or other variable, personal attributes. Guided by the model, we outline a new Group Support System (GSS) based technique called directed brainstorming. We propose the Cognitive Network Model is useful for explaining the effectiveness of existing creativity techniques, and may represent a basis from which new techniques and technologies for enhancing the creative output of problem-solvers can be developed.

Abstract: One of the challenges being addressed within education, and higher education in particular, is that of providing students with life-long learning skills. The speed with which technology evolves, the multiplicity of its impact on society and the ramifications of that impact mean that more than technical competence with specific tools and techniques is necessary. This is especially true of disciplines where changing technology is one of the raisons d’être. This paper focuses on the background to an approach based at the School of Engineering, Murdoch University to enhance the adaptability skills and knowledge of Software Engineering students by stressing the need for divergent thinking and creativity within a formal course in Requirements Engineering.

In today's highly dynamic business environment, organisational creativity is one of the most important sources of competitive advantage. Although the unpredictability of creativity makes it difficult to plan for, it may still be possible to facilitate it given that we understand what affects it. In the first argumentative part of this paper, the author criticises the demand for organisational convergence often found in management literature and instead suggests seven other enabling factors of organisational creativity. Information technology's role in knowledge management-related activities have also been debated. While the technocrats often promote IT as the solution to virtually every KM-related problem, others claim that KM is fundamentally a people-related activity and warn of the IT-bias in today's KM approaches. In particular, when it comes to the role of corporate intranets in KM efforts, many contradictory views have been reported. The second part of this paper identifies the characteristics of the intranet and relates these to the seven enabling factors for creativity. The objective is

In 1993 Couger et al. stated in an MIS Quarterly article on creativity in information systems (IS) organizations that the topic of creativity is under-researched in the IS discipline. Is the subject of creativity—despite its undisputable importance for individuals, organizations, and societies—still a neglected area in IS research? In what contexts, with what methods, and with what results have IS researchers studied the phenomenon of creativity? And what creativity-related themes warrant further investigation? In this article we analyze, based on six analytical dimensions, IS studies on creativity published in the eight top-ranked IS journals as recommended by the Association for Information Systems. The analysis provides a detailed picture of how the concept of creativity has been treated in our discipline‘s arguably most influential publication outlets. It becomes apparent that IS researchers have been