Collaborative Creativity

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Collaborative Creativity Daniel Gooch

University of Bath Dept. of Computer Science

Bath BA2 7AY

[email protected]

Ryan Kelly University of Bath

Dept. of Computer Science Bath

BA2 7AY [email protected]

Peter Lock University of Bath



Jesús Villanueva Perales University of Bath



No man is an island, entire of itself;

every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. John Donne

Creativity is defined as the “ability to produce work that is novel, high in quality, and appropriate (Sternberg et al., 2004, p. 351). They view creativity as a wide-scoping topic that is important at both individual and societal levels. Simonton (cited by Sternberg et al., 2004, p. 358) statistically links eminent levels of creativity in a society to environmental variables that are socio-dependent, such as war, availability of role models, and number of competitors.

The benefits of creativity are incredibly visible in today’s society. However, these creative products are assumed by Sternberg et al. to be the consequence of individual creativity. They make no mention of the direct effect that a collection of individuals can have on a single project. Rather, the cognitive process of innovation is presented as primarily the responsibility of the individual; interaction between individuals in a creative work is secondary, manifested in the form of criticism or encouragement. Amongst others, we shall analyse primarily the research of John-Steiner, Sawyer, Fischer and Shneiderman in an attempt to reconcile an understanding of collaborative creativity. We will discuss the aspects of collaboration they consider to be of importance, before looking at environments they have developed to support collaborative creativity. We will also evaluate a selection of environments and consider their respective successes and failures.

Vera John-Steiner is a professor of Linguistics and Education at the University of New Mexico, and author of ‘Creative Collaboration’ (2000). She sees a clear distinction between cooperation and collaboration. In cooperative tasks individuals make specific contributions and have differing levels of involvement and intellectual ownership of the resulting product. In collaborative endeavors, there is a ‘more fully realised equality in roles and responsibilities’ and participants frequently perceive their task as a joint effort. This distinction is based on the work of Damon & Phelps (1989). John-Steiner talks about the need for breaking down the “boundaries of the self”. She quotes Braque (cited by John-Steiner, 2000, p. 190) as saying, “We are inclined to efface our personalities in order to find originality”. However, the degree of self-effacing and tentative listening within a collaborative group can vary, as can other traits such as relative individual intellect and domain knowledge. John-Steiner asserts a collection of distinct yet connected patterns of collaboration: distributed, complementary, family and integrative. Distributed collaboration is the most flexible area of collaboration and therefore the most fragile. Individuals within a distributed collaborative group exchange information, ideas and opinions. However, their roles are “informal and voluntary”. As an example, John-Steiner cites

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electronic discussion groups, where “one person may assume a more active organizing role, while others may remain ‘lurkers’”. Distributed groups are based around the task itself, so any major disagreements may often lead to the dissolution of the group. However, if deeper ties can be established, such as respect, friendship or comradeship, lasting partnerships can often form.

In complementary collaboration labour is divided between group members based on the complementary nature of their individual expertise, disciplinary knowledge or personality traits. This division of labour is fixed on instantiation and remains the same whilst the task is carried out. Therefore, relationships within the group are defined by this labour-division, and so there may be an implied (or indeed, explicit) hierarchy within the group. It is only the shared ownership of the final solution that will set the collaborative group apart from a co-operative group. As an example of complementarity in collaboration, John-Steiner cites Albert Einstein’s development of the theory of general relativity, where he enlisted the expertise of close friend mathematician Marcel Grossmann to explain the principles of Riemann geometry. Together they co-authored two papers, and therefore their endeavor is seen by John-Steiner as complementarily collaborative, and not simply cooperation between two domains. Family collaboration is John-Steiner’s umbrella term for collaboration between married or long-term sexual partners, or related individuals such as siblings. Since the links between collaborators in a familial context are deeper than the problem they are addressing, there is a greater degree of flexibility within the group in terms of role-definition and responsibility. Trust is something that is probably already existent to a high degree between peers within the group or partnership. John-Steiner cites the collaboration between the married couple Will and Ariel Durant, who together wrote ‘The Story of Civilization’ (John-Steiner, 2000, pp. 11-15). Ariel began by simply classifying the heaps of notes written by Will, but

during the course of the work the emphasis of Ariel’s role changed to both providing criticism and suggesting content. It was at this stage that Will decided to make Ariel co-author of the series, writing that “simple justice required that the title page should bear both of our names”. John-Steiner concludes that “the Durants moved from being partners in dialogue who cooperated with each other to full-fledged collaborators”. There is a degree of similarity between family and complementary collaboration. However, the latter only allows for fixed patterns of collaboration, whereas the former allows for more dynamic integration of expertise. The provision of support structures within family collaboration is essential: family collaborations without sufficient support structures will soon break down. John-Steiner writes that “participants help each other to shift roles, including the move from novice to a more expert level”.

John-Steiner argues that “transformative changes require joint efforts. The weight of disciplinary and artistic socialization is hard to overcome without assistance” (John-Steiner, 2000, p. 203). Her claim is that it is within the area of integrative collaboration that the creation of new paradigms and art forms is best facilitated. John-Steiner states that integrative partnerships “require a prolonged period of vision”, concluding that “integrative partnerships are motivated by the desire to transform existing knowledge, thought styles, or artistic approaches into new visions”. John-Steiner uses the example of Cubism, created and developed by Picasso and Braque in an “integrated, transformative collaboration” (John-Steiner, 2000, p. 203). Within this collaboration there were no definitions of role; rather both artists created their individual works, and sought support, evaluation and fostering from the other. The work of one of the pair was not thought to be finished without the approval of the other. Between them they encouraged one another to make bolder moves into the newly-defined area of cubism, a bold artistic movement in which the subjects are represented simultaneously from

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different viewpoints using mainly basic shapes. The confidence of their exploration is evident in sequential art-pieces. There is a need for a depth of relationship within integrative collaborations akin to that within family collaborations. John-Steiner notes the overlapping of the boundaries of integrative and complementary collaboration (John-Steiner, 2000, p. 70): it is the enormity of the task undertaken by the collaborators, and arguably whether the task is successfully completed, that defines their group as integrative.

Keith Sawyer, one of the world’s leading experts on creativity, views creativity differently from Vera John-Steiner in that he does not explicitly state a difference between cooperation and collaboration in creativity. This suggests that he sees no distinction between the two. His overall worldview of creativity is simplistic: collaboration is absolutely essential for creativity.

Sawyer asserts that most people believe that innovation occurs from the creative spark created by one person. Sawyer contests that this simply isn’t the case; ideas emerge from a creative web of individuals who all have some part to play in the generation of the creative spark. Sawyer describes how many innovations that are considered to be the product of a single creative mind are actually the results of collaboration between seemingly unrelated individuals. For example, in his book ‘Group Genius’ (Sawyer, 2007, p. 78), he describes how the esteemed authors J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis might never have produced their renowned works of fiction if they had not evaluated each other’s ideas and collaborated with the members of their Oxford University reading circle. Here we see an example of the difference in definition of collaboration by Sawyer and John-Steiner: the latter would see Tolkien and Lewis as cooperation partners, rather than collaborators. Much of Sawyer’s work focuses on improvisational groups. In Group Genius, Sawyer explains how collaboration between individuals can often unwittingly lead to the birth of new insights and global phenomena. Furthermore,

Sawyer believes that collaboration is the secret to breakthrough creativity. By building on the work of John-Steiner, he examines the spontaneous improvisation of theatre groups and jazz bands, where group success is often determined by each participant’s ability to play off of other group members. Each individual provides the sparks for further creative innovations, resulting in an entertaining performance. He believes that in both improvisational groups and work teams, each person’s individual contribution provides the spark for the next.

After examining the interactions of spontaneous improvisational groups, Sawyer identified several key characteristics of successful teams. These include the ability to build on collaborator’s ideas and allow innovation to emerge over time, the practice of deep listening, the need to recognise that innovation is inefficient (that not every idea is a good one), that often surprising questions emerge, and that innovation is bottom up and therefore successful improvisational groups often don’t require a leader and can be allowed to self-organise and restructure as necessary.

Much of Sawyer’s work focuses on how creativity occurs within professional multinational organisations. He believes that successful companies keep small sparks of creativity running by temporarily bringing together individuals from across different disciplines within an organisation, before taking any innovations back with them to their respective departments. He also believes that it is important that companies separate their innovation across a number of locations, in effect raising a spatial boundary between the involved parties. He cites Weick’s claim that “loosely coupled organisations formed from autonomous building blocks that can be brought together, disconnected, or re-formed with relatively little disturbance are more innovative than carefully planned organisations” (cited by Sawyer, 2007, p. 156). Citing the work of Csikszentmihalyi (1996), Sawyer describes the need for flow in improvisational groups. ‘Flow’ is the name given

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to the state of mind experienced when a creative individual is at his or her peak, such that they experience “a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which we feel in control of our actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present, and future” (Sawyer, 2007, p. 42). Sawyer recognises that for an environment to support collaboration, it must support group flow.

There is some evidence to suggest that failures play a role in collaborative creativity. Sawyer (2007, pg. 109) offers a quote from Linus Pauling: “I am constantly asked by students how I get good ideas. My answer is simple: First, have a lot of ideas. Then, throw away the bad ones”. Likewise, Intel’s director of strategy and technology, Mary Murphy-Hoye (cited by LaBarre, 2002), states: “If we’re not failing ten times more than we’re succeeding, it means that we’re not taking enough risks”. This links with the beliefs of Simonton (1996), who states that “the best bet for producing lasting ideas is to go for a large quantity of ideas”. These statements correspond with the work of Schank & Neaman (2001) who believe that “In order to succeed, you must fail”. They provide an anecdote from Michael Jordan who says: “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life… and that is why I succeed”.

This view that failure is integral to creativity contrasts with John-Steiner’s view that during distributed collaboration, failures can cause a group to splinter and disintegrate. However, sometimes groups are loosely coupled, whereas an exceptional individual like Michael Jordan is part of a strong team of basketball players, all of whom will allow their star player some leeway for failure. Gerhard Fischer’s ideas of collaborative creativity run in parallel with those of Sawyer. Fischer’s manifesto is that “The power of the unaided, individual mind is highly overrated: The Renaissance scholar no longer exists” (Fischer, 2005, p. 128). Akin to John-Steiner and Sawyer, Fischer believes that group processes are essential

to creativity. However, it seems that John-Steiner’s breakdown of collaboration is different to Fischer’s because John-Steiner’s is based on the nature of interaction between members of a group whereas Fischer’s is based upon each member’s individual background knowledge.

Much of Gerhard Fischer’s work into creativity focuses on the role of collaboration in design activities. Fischer describes four barriers which can affect the creativity of groups: Spatial, Temporal, Conceptual and Technological barriers.

The Spatial barrier refers to the fact that group members can be distributed across multiple locations. This therefore means that participants are unable to meet face-to-face. Fischer affirms Brown and Duguid’s claim that “digital technologies are adept at maintaining communities already formed. They are less good at making them” (Fischer, 2004). The main opportunity is allowing “the shift that shared concerns rather than shared location becomes the prominent defining feature of a group of people interacting with each other” (Fischer, 2004).

Sawyer observes that collaboration can occur over time (Sawyer, 2007, p. 99). Fischer recognises this, and identifies a temporal barrier to collaboration. This barrier refers to the fact that acquisition of knowledge takes a considerable length of time, and design tasks are often realised over a period of time and can involve many different individuals. Furthermore, outside individuals can often shed light on an old problem, giving fresh insight and opinion which can lead to the exploration of new creative pathways.

Fischer believes that it takes a long time to gain knowledge of a domain: “to master as thoroughly as possible what is already known in a domain with the ultimate goal being to transcend conventions, not to succumb to them”. Fischer mainly focuses upon the effect that long term projects have upon groups. Even an individual working on a project will change over time and cannot be considered to have the same skill set at all points in time.

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According to Fischer, the main way of overcoming the temporal barrier is to save the rationale behind design decisions. Fischer attempts to achieve two conflicting goals: Recording design rationale should not subtract too many cognitive resources from the task and assure that rationale is partly formalised so that computational support is easy to retrieve.

The Technological barrier is concerned with making the computer a supporting tool rather than a hindrance. This should lead to a “relationship in which computers do not emulate human capabilities but complement them” (Fischer, 2004). Fischer claims that “design can be described as a reflective conversation between designers and the design they create”. This is termed to be “back-talk”. The main “barriers occur when the ‘back-talk’ is represented in a form that users are unable to comprehend… or when the back-talk created by the design situation itself is insufficient”. Domain Oriented Design Environments (DODEs) attempt to resolve this issue. The goals for DODEs in supporting collaboration are to promote interaction with the problem and not just the computer, and to increase the back-talk of the situation by integrating action and reflection into a single environment.

Fischer delineates collaborative groups into “Homogenous Design Communities” also known as Communities of Practice (CoPs) and “Heterogeneous Design Communities” also known as Communities of Interest (CoIs). CoPs “consist of practitioners who work as a community in a certain domain undertaking similar work” (Fischer, 2004, p. 5). Examples would include architects, urban planners or traditional research groups. In comparison a CoI “brings together stakeholders from different CoPs to solve a particular [design] problem of common concern” (Fischer, 2004, p. 5). An example of this would be a team of software designers, marketing specialists, psychologists and programmers interested in software development.

CoPs are biased toward communicating with the same people and taking advantage of a shared background, whereas CoIs have greater potential for creativity because different backgrounds and perspectives lead to new insights. This is supported by Sawyer’s claim that groups are effective at generating innovation because they bring together far more concepts and bodies of knowledge than any one person can. He states that “group genius can only happen if the brains in the team don’t contain all the same stuff” (Sawyer, 2007, p. 72).

Fischer’s aim is not to categorise, but rather to support groups by identifying useful patterns of practice and helpful technologies. Whilst he recognises that CoPs and CoIs can change over time, he hasn’t represented this in a formal way. As Figure 2 demonstrates, the difference between CoPs and CoIs could be viewed as a continuum rather than a clear distinction.

Figure 1: A DODE example Figure 2: the CoP-CoI continuum

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Fischer et al. (2005) propose the use of boundary objects to aid creativity. Boundary objects are externalisations that “serve to communicate and coordinate the perspectives of various constituencies”. (Bruner, 1996) claims that “Externalisations produce a record of our mental efforts, one that is outside us rather than in memory”. An example of a set of boundary objects would be architectural designs including blueprints through to prototypical mock-ups of buildings used by architects, town planners and clients. Boundary objects are important for two reasons. Firstly, they serve as externalisations which can then undergo innovative manipulations, as discussed by Oxman (1997). This is representative of a conversation between a creator and his or her design (Schön, 1983). This means that any technology that seeks to support collaborative tasks must support the process of externalising knowledge, such that it can then be re-represented and redesigned. The second reason boundary objects are important is that they allow conversation to occur between people involved in a design task, even if those people have different knowledge bases. Furthermore, Sawyer states that conversation between people is critical to collaboration. The spatial and temporal barriers identified by Fischer may obstruct this conversational process. So, any solution that attempts to overcome these barriers must support conversation between the individuals involved in a design task.

In order to evaluate Fischer’s work towards developing collaborative environments, we would like to use a number of criteria derived from the work of Sawyer. We have identified a number of important group processes that must be supported in order to foster collaborative creativity. These are the needs for conversation, reflection, improvisation and the support of ‘flow’. However, as flow is difficult to quantify (especially without being able to observe participants at work) it is impossible to completely evaluate how well each environment supports group flow.

Fischer has developed a number of tools to support collaborative creativity. We will now describe these tools and evaluate them against both Fischer’s barriers (spatial, temporal, technological and conceptual) and the criteria identified from Sawyer’s work, namely conversation, reflection, improvisation and support of flow. As discussed previously, evaluating how well a tool supports flow without watching participants using the tool is impossible. The final criteria for evaluation of the tools will be whether the environment allows the user to fail – identified as important by Sawyer among others.

Having identified the evaluation criteria, it is now necessary to discuss the tools. Web2gether (Fischer, 2004) is intended to provide “professional and social support for caregivers”. It is intended to not only allow people to “find resources, but also form social networks”. This is a good example of how to overcome both spatial and temporal barriers because it brings together participants from spatially disparate locations and supports asynchronous communication. However, we do not consider it an example of collaborative creativity, rather merely a collaborative information sharing tool; therefore, Web2gether cannot be evaluated against our criteria.

Figure 3: Web2gether

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The next example is called I-Balls, an application that “helps users to record and investigate design rationale” (Fischer, 2004). I-Balls is designed to support projects that take place over an extended period of time. “The rationale behind decisions [should] be recorded in the first place”. In this way the temporal barrier can be overcome through recording key design decisions. It is also intended to overcome the conceptual barrier as it forms a “barrier object” which can “support communication about not only evolving artifacts but also background context and rationale about the artifacts”. As the system allows you to annotate the design in any way necessary it is assumed that the system does allow you to fail as an incorrect design can be annotated to describe the reasoning behind the design. However this being the case it suggests that the technological barrier is not overcome as there is no “back talk” from the design. Taking Sawyer’s criteria, the system clearly allows conversation – both with the design and with the author. The system supports reflection as the comments made upon the design need not be statements but could be questions to be answered after the reflection period. The authors cannot tell whether the system provides means for improvisation; on that basis it is assumed that it does not.

One of the more complex systems presented by Fischer is EDC (Arias et al., 2000) (Fischer, 2004). It is intended to be used as a tool for activities such as transportation planning or flood mitigation. It consists of an action space whereby simulations can be run and controlled using physical objects, and a reflection space where significant information is presented. The

important aspect of using physical objects is that this allows the conceptual barrier to be overcome as the boundary objects are clearly perceivable. However, the spatial and temporal barriers are not supported as the system requires face-to-face interaction within a shared construction space. The system does overcome the technological barrier as the simulation produces back-talk which is both sufficient and comprehendible. The system does allow failure – one example given in (Arias et al., 2000) is planning bus routes. The system is set up such that the users can construct the route any way they like – subsequently one of the routes does not take into account any of the population or business centres. The system clearly allows conversation with the design. However, given the co-located nature of the participants, it is arguable whether the system supports conversation between users. By separating out the action space from the reflection space the system makes a conscious effort to support reflection. With regards to improvisation, the system is based around simulations. It therefore clearly allows users to improvise with different ideas and test them out without fear of that becoming the fixed design.

One of the more controversial environments Fischer has developed is CodeBroker. The system monitors what a software developer is currently doing and infers the problem they are trying to solve. From this inference, the system delivers reusable components (Fischer et al., 2005). The system is only collaborative in as far as the

Figure 4: I-Balls

Figure 5: EDC

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components are contributed from several individuals. This essentially means that the spatial and temporal barriers are not relevant. With regards to the conceptual barrier, the code itself stands as the boundary object. Technologically the system encourages back-talk as the component suggested is identified as being relevant to the task the user is undertaking. Of course it is questionable whether the system is capable of performing such a task. If the match is a trivial one the user can perform the match themselves. Given the current state of AI research it is unlikely that anything other than a trivial match could be made. Likewise, it is questionable as to whether such a system could allow you to fail – if the task is correctly identified and a suitable component can be found, the only point of failure is as to whether the task being undertaken is the correct one. Likewise there is no opportunity for improvisation or reflection as the components are always relevant. Sawyer’s only criteria that could be considered to be met is that of conversation but only so far as the code listing itself provides a conversation with the problem.

Ben Shneiderman does not provide an explicit definition of collaboration or collaborative creativity. However, he uses Csikszentmihalyi's definition of creativity as the foundation for his work. Csikszentmihalyi defined creativity as the creation of new ideas or the realisation of an unknown pattern using the elements found in a

certain domain (cited in Shneiderman, 1998b, p. 90). This new idea or pattern should also be accepted by the field in order to be added to the creative domain. Shneiderman’s overall aim is to create a framework to boost the number of quality creative innovations in all fields of knowledge.

Shneiderman proposes a framework called Genex. This framework consists of four stages:

• Collect: gather information from a certain

domain of knowledge. • Create: devising new ides using

appropriate tools to support creativity. • Consult: refine the idea with other fellows

and practitioners. • Disseminate: distribute that new creation

to the community.

According to Shneiderman, all these stages should take place on a digital platform. This will allow exploitation of standardization capabilities to produce exchangeable data sets which can then be processed by different applications and distributed out into the community. Collecting information is not traditionally seen as a collaborative process. However, collaboration from different sources is required to create a common domain of knowledge. This domain of knowledge can then be offered to all practitioners and researchers as a starting point for their studies. For example, summary chapters present condensed knowledge, which are ideal starting points for newcomers to a subject. After retrieving information from the domain of knowledge, the creative process starts. Shneiderman claims that the creation of new ideas should be an individual process supported by computerised tools which enable the user to achieve higher levels of creativity. However, these new ideas should be refined by collaborating with close colleagues or ‘mentors’. This stage could also be carried out with the help of computers. Researchers could post their work to get reviews from other scientists. In addition,

Figure 6: CodeBroker

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e-mail, newsgroups and chat rooms could become a means to collaborate with peers during the refinement phase. This is a similar idea to Fischer’s theoretical work on communities of interest, where boundary objects are necessary to overcome the conceptual barrier between diverse participants. In addition to proposing the Genex framework, Shneiderman also took part in the development of some tools supporting his framework. However, they can only be seen as separate tools supporting certain phases of the Genex framework, rather than a complete Genex environment. The most successful tool is Lifelines (Plaisant et al, 1996), an environment for visualising and querying information about a person or a set of persons throughout time. LifeLines tries to implement the first stage of Genex ("Collect"), allowing the user to retrieve information about personal records and then display it in visual form. This visualisation is done using a graphic representation of the record as a set of actions occurring in a timeline. According to the creators, this visualisation technique allows the user to identify relationships between different records that would be hard to find using plain text. This tool was used to display records of juvenile cases at the Maryland Department of Juvenile Justice, receiving positive feedback from users (Rose et al., 1996). LifeLines was also used to display medical records, although no particular feedback was given by application users. A second version of Lifelines (LifeLines2, 2008) was released several years later. This version is still in use (Wang, 2008) and is mainly applied to the graphical representation of medical records. The project keeps drawing the attention of the community and several workshops have been arranged to present improvements on the application (June 2004 and May 2008).

Figure 7: LifeLines2

As well as LifeLines, Shneiderman has participated in other minor projects, the main one being ‘Shore’ (Shore2000, 2008). The application attempted to put in practice the third stage of the Genex framework (“Relate”) by asking students to post their work on a webpage to allow others to review their work and to propose changes. This environment was cited in Shneiderman's Genex paper (Shneiderman, 1998), with the final version titled `Shore2000’. However, a different project unrelated to Shneiderman has been carrying out the same idea since 1991. It is called "arXiv" (arXiv, 2008), and it is an e-Library of scientific research papers managed by the Cornell University Library. It holds more than half a million of papers on Physics, Mathematics and other sciences, and the number of papers is still growing. Although Shneiderman had no part in its development, Scratch (Monroy-Hernandez, 2008) can be seen as a Genex environment. This environment is aimed at children and teenagers of both sexes to learn, create and share programmable media using a built-in integrated development environment. Within this environment, users can look for previous work by other users, download it, modify it and then share it with the community of users to get feedback.

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Those works can also be used, if applicable, to create new ones. This environment is probably the best example of the Genex framework because it gives the opportunity to carry out the framework’s four stages:

• Collect: users can search through a database of more than 50,000 projects.

• Create: new projects can be created via a built-in tool.

• Relate: users can ask for help from others.

• Donate: once the project it is finished, it can be distributed and be part of the domain to be used as a starting point for new projects or just as inspiration.

Shneiderman’s Genex framework does not compare favorably with regards to the criteria derived from Sawyer. Although it does support some level of reflection and conversation with a problem, it does not support synchronous communication between participants in a task. It also does little to foster improvisation in a spontaneous group. Shneiderman’s ‘relate’ stage could support the production of analogies but no mention of that is made during his work. Shneiderman also makes no mention of the barriers identified by Fischer. Shneiderman initially seems unclear about the structure of his Genex framework. In his original work he proposes the need to ‘relate, create and donate’ (Shneiderman, 1998a). His view then changes to the fact that you need to ‘collect, create, consult and disseminate’ (Shneiderman, 1998b).

He finally arrives at the need to ‘collect, relate, create, donate’ (Shneiderman, 2000) and only at this stage does he explicate the reasons behind the evolution of his model. Shneiderman claims that the reason he altered his framework is because he sought to combine both papers written in 1998, citing the need to base his framework on the ‘close relationship [between] learning and creativity’ (Shneiderman, 2000). He describes his model as a semi-iterative process, whereby an

individual can return to a previous stage at any time. At this point, his model is further confused by the introduction of eight activities that can also occur at any time during the Genex stages.

In 2000, Shneiderman contradicts himself when criticising the view that “problem solving in creativity [is] portrayed as [the] lonely experience of wrestling with the problem, breaking through various blocks and finding clever solutions”. This directly contradicts his previous view that ‘creativity is a demanding personal journey that follows diverse paths’ (Shneiderman, 1998b). Any thought-process leading to this change of opinion has not been made explicit in any of his work. Shneiderman’s own view of the creative process has changed over time alongside his research. Our main criticism is that he seems more interested in using alliteration and clever rhymes to create a snappy title for his manifesto instead of doing anything that is substantial towards creating environments that can support collaboration. There are many differences between the researchers’ definitions and environments. Fischer and Shneiderman’s views on the collaborative process are wildly different: Fischer sees collaboration as central to the creative process whereas Shneiderman considers the creative process to be a “demanding personal journey that follows diverse paths” (Shneiderman, 1998b).

There is a general acceptance that collaboration is key to creativity. However, there is still disagreement over the definition of collaboration in creativity. Unlike Sawyer and Fischer, John-Steiner makes a distinction between cooperation and collaboration. Fischer’s view of collaboration is that people must directly contribute to a task, whereas Sawyer and Shneiderman consider any kind of outside influence as collaboration. In contrast, John-Steiner feels that joint ownership of a group effort is a fundamental element of collaboration.

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Generally, the researchers have formed a strong theoretical understanding of how to support collaborative creativity, in terms of the processes that need to be supported in order to optimise the output of a creative group. However, their efforts towards developing these environments have been adequate but far from excellent. For example, Fischer’s environments provide good support for creative processes, overcome barriers and allow participants to fail, but do not facilitate support for these to occur at the same time. Thus, there is potential for the research to be applied in more effective forms to create successful tools. Currently, the environments described in this paper do not exist outside of the research community. These tools will never succeed unless they fit with existing practices or offer an advantage over these practices that make change worthwhile. The environments detailed in this paper were only used by practitioners when they were encouraged to do so. Once the research ended, the use of the tools diminished.

With reference to Shneiderman, conceptually it is still unclear what a Genex is capable of. Our evaluation of Shneiderman is based upon our vague idea of what a Genex is, which may or may not correspond to Shneiderman’s understanding of the model. Shneiderman states that “Thesauri are to words what Genexes will be to ideas” (Shneiderman, 1998b). The problem with this is that words are well-defined and are easy to collect because, in a language, there are a finite number of words. Likewise, words have a fixed interpretation, whereas ideas are transient. Sawyer states that “ideas must be left open to multiple interpretations – they should be equivocal”. Creating a central store of knowledge is problematic. Sawyer (Sawyer, 2007, p. 144) describes how a number of professional companies created databases trying to capture and centralize the collective knowledge of their professional staff. The goal was to inspire innovation by helping people make connections, but all of the firms discovered that these databases were useless at facilitating innovation. Sawyer states that databases are of little use with

problem-finding creativity and “when no-one knows what the problem is or what question to ask, databases can’t help” (Sawyer, 2007, p. 145). Secondly, computers can’t tolerate indirectness. Therefore, if a Genex is to be successful, it needs to be able to ‘suggest the question’. The concept of Genex seems to be more about creating something that is good enough or ‘best fit’ rather than something that is truly creative. Environments designed to support collaborative creativity can only support the development of an idea that already exists – they cannot directly suggest new ideas, but can sometimes help a user discover new ones, as shown by Fischer’s ECD environment. We have argued that failure is critical to developing creative ideas and any environment that supports collaborative creativity must allow for failures. This is because failing multiple times assists the refinement of a creative solution and failure helps you to see where you went wrong and allows you to redefine your approach to a problem. John-Steiner argues that the collaborative team itself must be structured so that failure does not cause the dissolution of the group. It’s not the act of failing that is important but the acceptance of the failure and the ability to reflect upon why the failure occurred. Therefore, if an environment allows you to fail, it is also supporting the redefinition of a question and therefore the overall creative process. John Donne said “no man is an island”, and whilst the work of John-Steiner, Sawyer and Fischer do not agree on a single definition of collaborative creativity the acceptance of collaboration as key to creative output is mutually held. There is still much work to be done towards the development of environments that support collaboration and collaborative creativity. If collaboration is truly an integral part of creativity, the need to develop environments that support this process will only increase. The challenge lies in building environments that effectively support all of the processes necessary for collaborative creativity.

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