Design issues for supporting collaborative creativity

Abstract

Technical support of collaborative creativity is a complex challenge because the interacting people usually have differing backgrounds, thought processes or self expression, and their collaboration is only weakly structured and should be highly flexible. We outline the heterogeneous characteristics of creativity and their dimensions, and describe the barriers to be overcome. On this basis, five CSCW-oriented design heuristics are derived: Supporting the large picture – the visualization of rich material the malleability of shared material and stimulation of variations support of convergence within evolutionary documentation smooth transitions between different modes of creative collaboration integration of communication with work on shared material.