The power of the unaided, individual mind is highly overrated: The Renaissance scholar no longer exists. Although creative individuals are often thought of as working in isolation, the role of interaction and collaboration with other individuals is critical to creativity. Creative activity grows out of the relationship between individuals and their work, and from the interactions between an individual and other human beings. Because complex problems require more knowledge than any single person possesses, it is necessary that all involved stakeholders participate, communicate, collaborate, and learn from each other. Distances (across spatial, temporal, and technological dimensions) and diversity (bringing stakeholders together from different cultures) are important sources for social creativity. This paper describes conceptual frameworks and sociotechnical environments (derived from the systems that we have developed over the last decade) in which social creativity can come alive. Keywords design, social creativity, spatial distance, temporal distance, technological distance, diversity, communities of practice, communities of interest, division of labor

Abstract. Design is a ubiquitous, collaborative and highly material activity. Because of the embodied nature of the design profession, designers apply certain collaborative practices to enhance creativity in their everyday work. Within the domain of industrial design, we studied two educational design departments over a period of eight months. Using examples from our fieldwork, we develop our results around three broad themes related to collaborative practices that support the creativity of design professionals: 1) externalization, 2) use of physical space, and 3) use of bodies. We believe that these themes of collaborative practices could provide new insights into designing technologies for supporting a varied set of design activities. We describe two conceptual collaborative systems derived from the results of our study.

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Despite many professed benefits of collaboration, some computer science educators feel students need to master work individually, particularly in the courses early in the curriculum that feed into software engineering courses. In the natural sciences, however, students almost always work with one or more partners in the laboratory. What can computer science educators learn about collaborative lab settings from our natural science counterparts? We conducted a survey of science and computer science educators to compare views and use of collaboration in their classes. The positive and negative aspects of collaboration, as reported by the natural science educators, are strikingly similar to those of computer science educators. These results suggest that computer science educators should be more open to the use of collaborative labs, as is done in the natural sciences, for the overall benefit to students. 1.

Information technology (IT) is often promoted as a socially and culturally agnostic tool that will allow emerging economies to leap into the digital age and reap the wealth that accompanies it. But in addition to the programming language, software tools, and books, know-how is needed to turn bright ideas into innovative, marketable solutions. This know-how can only be acquired from experience or from other IT developers. An effective means for sharing know-how is through an open exchange, which we characterize as a space where interested people can learn, critique, and contest ideas. It’s a locale that is defined in terms of activity, rather than geography, technology, or membership. We use open exchanges of know-how as an analytical lens to example historical examples and contemporary instances. While conducting fieldwork in India, we observed open exchange occurring at Barcamp Bangalore. It is through these exchanges of know-how, rather than the transmission of tools or software artifacts that IT knowledge flows between international locales. We conclude this paper with a discussion that is mutually informed by contemporary practice and historical configurations.

Socio-technical systems integrate technical and organizational structures and are related to various stakeholders and their perspectives. The design of socio-technical systems has to support this integration and to take the differing perspectives into account. To support this goal, the design concepts have to be represented with appropriate documentation methods, which combine formal and informal aspects. Communication processes have to be facilitated which systematically refer to these kinds of documentation. Therefore a socio-technical, semi-structured modeling method (SeeMe) is introduced. It represents socio-technical concepts with diagrams which can be developed, evaluated and improved by the socio-technical walkthrough (STWT). This facilitation method—together with a corresponding software-tool—has proven to be suitable for socio-technical design in complex, practical projects. A maximum of explicitness leads to a minimum of understandability —Ungeheuer, 1982 (translated from the German p. 328)

One goal of design rationale systems is to support designers by providing a means to record and communicate the argumentation and reasoning behind the design process. However, there are several inherent limitations to developing systems that effectively capture and utilize design rationale. The dynamic and contextual nature of design and our inability to exhaustively analyze all possible design issues results in cognitive, capture, retrieval, and usage limitations. In this chapter we analyze these issues in terms of current perspectives in design theory, and describe the implications to design research. We discuss the barriers to effective design rationale in terms of three major goals: reflection, communication, and analysis of design processes. We then suggest alternate means to achieve these goals that can be used with or instead of design rationale systems.

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