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

Individual, unaided human abilities are constrained. Media have helped us to transcend boundaries in thinking, working, learning, and collaborating by supporting distributed intelligence. Wireless and mobile technologies provide new opportunities for empowering humans, but not without potential pitfalls. We explore these opportunities and pitfalls from a lifelong-learning perspective and discuss how wireless and mobile technologies can influence and change conceptual frameworks such as the relationship between planning and situated action, context awareness, human attention, distances in collaborative design activities, and the trade-off between tools for living and tools for learning. The impact of wireless and mobile technologies is illustrated with our research projects, which focus on moving “computing off the desktop ” by “going small, large, and everywhere. ” Specific examples include human-centered public transportation systems, collaborative design, and information sharing with smart physical objects.

The history of the human race is one of increasing intellectual capability. Since the time of our early ancestors, our brains have gotten no bigger; nevertheless, there has been a steady accretion of new tools for intellectual work (including advanced visual interfaces) and an increasing distribution of complex activities among many minds. Despite this transcendence of human cognition beyond what is “inside ” a person’s head, most studies and frameworks on cognition have disregarded the social, physical, and artifactual surroundings in which cognition and human activity take place. Distributed intelligence provides an effective theoretical framework for understanding what humans can achieve and how artifacts and tools can be designed and evaluated to empower human beings and to change tasks. This paper presents and discusses the conceptual frameworks and systems that we have developed over the last decade to create effective socio-technical environments supporting distributed intelligence.

The first decade of the World Wide Web predominantly enforced a clear separation between designers and consumers. New technological developments, such as the cyberinfrastructure and Web 2.0 architectures, have emerged to support a participatory Web and social computing. These developments are the foundations for a fundamental shift from consumer cultures (specialized in producing finished goods to be consumed passively) to cultures of participation (in which all people are provided with the means to participate actively in personally meaningful activities). End-user development and meta-design provide foundations for this fundamental transformation. They explore and support new approaches for the design, adoption, appropriation, adaptation, evolution, and sharing of artifacts by all participating stakeholders. They take into account that cultures of participation are not dictated by technology alone: they are the result of incremental shifts in human behavior and social organizations. The design, development, and assessment of five particular applications that contributed to the development of our theoretical framework are described and discussed.

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Abstract. Our research explores meta-design as an innovative framework in the design of an emerging type of software-intensive systems called participative software systems. The fundamental challenge facing this approach is achieving the best fit between the software system and its ever-changing context of use, problems, domains, users, and communities of users. Our objective is to define the scientific foundation for designing participative software systems: socio-technical environments that are capable of coping with emergent needs in the context of personally meaningful activities and that empower users, as owners of problems, to engage actively and collaboratively in continual development.

Understanding collective creativity is crucial for advancing the general study of human creativity as well as for guiding the design of creativity support tools for small teams and larger collectivities. In this article, a qualitative case study of collective creativity online, derived from an analysis of collaborative interactions of virtual teams of students working in the field of mathematics, is presented. Group creative activity is examined broadly, ranging from the microlevel coconstruction of novel resources for team problem solving to the evolutionary reuse of ideas and solution strategies across teams. The analysis focuses on describing the relationship between the dynamics of creative work present in a single collaborative episode of an online group and their evolution across time and across collectivities. The analysis indicates that the synergy between these two types of interactions and the resulting creative engagement of the teams relies on three fundamental processes: (a) indexical referencing, (b) group remembering, and (c) bridging across discontinuities.

The rise in social computing has facilitated a shift from consumer cultures to cultures of participation. These developments represent unique and fundamental opportunities and challenges for social creativity. The CreativeIT Wiki project represents an effort to explore and build a socio-technical environment for members of the emerging research community interested in creativity and information technology. Keywords cultures of participation, social creativity, democratizing

This thesis introduces a programming environment entitled Share that is designed to support and encourage loosely bound cooperation between individuals within communities of practice through the sharing of code. Loosely bound cooperation refers to the opportunity members of communities have to assist and share resources with one another while maintaining their autonomy and independent practice. We contrast this model with forms of collaboration that enable large numbers of distributed individuals to collaborate on large scale works where they are guided by a shared vision of what they are collectively trying to achieve. Our hypothesis is that providing fine-grained, publicly visible attribution of code sharing activity within a community can provide socially motivated encouragement for participation as well as pragmatic value of being able to better track downstream use and changes to contributions that an individual makes.