The Impact of Technology on Creativity in Design: An Enhancement?

Technology may be considered as an interface between individuals and the products they create, but we have to determine whether the use of new systems effectively enhance individuals' creative activities. In this paper, we present a new angle of reflection that we illustrate in the field of creative design, since it is a constant challenge for designers to introduce creativity in the projects they work on. The approach we propose is centred on designers' cognitive processes. We argue that both the development of new CAD (computer‐aided design) systems and their assessment should be conducted on the basis of a deep understanding of designers' cognitive processes. In accordance with this view, we present three empirical studies that were conducted in order to analyse the impact of new design support systems on designers' cognitive processes. Therefore, the results we present contribute to further our knowledge of whether new CAD technologies effectively facilitate designers' activities and enhance their creativity.     

The Designer's Self-Identity — Myths of Creativity and the Management of Teams1

This paper describes recent research conducted at Sheffield Hallam University in which practising designers reported on their experiences of working in a cross functional team. The survey related these experiences to the designers' attitudes to their creativity. Two models for creativity are proposed—one based on the romantic stereotype of the creative genius, the other taking creativity to be an attribute possessed by all human beings in some measure, which can be enhanced by personal effort or by training. Identifying features of cross functional teams which are likely to demand certain personal qualities in designers, the paper notes that these are at odds with the qualities of a ‘romantic-type’ creative person. The link between these qualities, and notions of personality as a set of fixed attributes is pointed out. Several theories of personality which describe mechanisms for change in self identity are described. It is noted that the results of the survey suggest that in many cases designers have a pragmatic attitude to their creativity, despite the prevalence of the romantic stereotype for creativity in the literature of both management and education. Principles are suggested for design education, to enable designers to re-evaluate creativity reflexively as a component of their self identity to enhance their performance as teamworkers.     

Could a Created Being Ever be Creative? Some Philosophical Remarks on Creativity and AI Development

Creativity has a special role in enabling humans to develop beyond the fulfilment of simple primary functions. This factor is significant for Artificial Intelligence (AI) developers who take replication to be the primary goal, since moves toward creating autonomous artificial-beings beg questions about their potential for creativity. Using Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following and language-games, I argue that although some AI programs appear creative, to call these programmed acts creative in our terms is to misunderstand the use of this word in language. I conclude that replication is not the best way forward for AI development in matters of creativity.     

Computational support for collective creativity

The goal of our research is to develop computer systems that support designers’ collective creativity; such systems support individual creative aspects in design through the use of representations created by others in the community. We have developed two systems, IAM-eMMa and EVIDII, that both aim at supporting designers in finding visual images that would be useful for their creative design task. IAM-eMMa uses knowledge-based rules, which are constructed by other designers, to retrieve images related to a design task, and infers the underlying “rationale” when a designer chooses one of the images. EVIDII allows designers to associate affective words and images, and then shows several visual representations of the relationships among designers, images and words. By observing designers interacting with the two systems, we have identified that systems for supporting collective creativity need to be based on design knowledge that: (1) is contextualized; (2) is respectable and trustful; and (3) enables “appropriation” of a design task.     

Attention! Cosmopolitans ahead – They may not be as creative as they think!

Research on cosmopolitanism and creativity has received significant attention in recent years; however, the connections between these constructs are still ill‐defined. This study uses the creative cognition model to explore the relationship between cosmopolitanism and creativity using both self‐report and expert ratings of a qualitative task. Quantitative data support the assertion that cosmopolitanism is significantly and positively related to self‐expectations of creativity and creative work involvement. However, creative performance on a productive solutions task coded by creativity experts failed to replicate the self‐reported findings. We describe the practical and theoretical implications of these results for future research into cosmopolitanism and creativity.     

Where the Art is: Defining and Managing Creativity in New Media SMEs

This paper examines the definition and management of creativity in the ‘creative industries’. Initially the paper sets out the economic and cultural context for the emergence of the creative industries, before going on to argue that there are gaps in our understanding of the role of creativity and particularly the management of creativity within these industries. Based on research undertaken with new media SMEs in the North West of England, the paper then explores the ways in which creativity is defined and managed within this sub–sector. It is shown that the meanings attached to creativity are variable and contested and that the precise definition and management of creativity is strongly determined by the internal workplace culture, and the external social and economic conditions within which firms operate. It is further suggested that while creativity is often seen as a ‘must have’ attribute for new media firms it may also, conversely, be considered a barrier to commercial success. The paper concludes that if we are to understand work and production in the creative industries, and offer institutional support for firms to develop and sustain creativity for competitive advantage, it may be necessary to develop a more detailed understanding of the role of creativity and creative management as both a general and specific, socially embedded process.     

Moral organizational creativity: Exploring ethical antecedents for a new construct

The objective of this article is to provide the means of supporting the coexistence of creativity and ethics at the organizational level. It contributes to the literature by offering a process model that shows how organizational creativity can be combined with ethics. This work begins by examining how the features of ethical work climates may affect creativity in organizations. We advocate the position that an organization can be both creative and moral through the triggering of moral imagination, dependent in part on the type of ethical work climate espoused in the workplace. As a result, we offer a new formulation of organizational creativity that includes an explicit ethical dimension: moral organizational creativity. This expanded concept treats the dominant elements of ethical work climates and moral imagination as essential ingredients of ethical and organizational creativity. Investigating the link between ethical work climates and moral imagination is meaningful to understanding how an organization can address the requirements of creativity and ethics and therefore enhance organizational creativity.     

Creativity in non‐routine jobs: The role of transformational leadership and organizational identification

An increasing number of individuals work in jobs with little standardization and repetition, that is, with high levels of job non‐routinization. At the same time, demands for creativity are high, which raises the question of how employees can use job non‐routinization to develop creativity. Acknowledging the importance of social processes for creativity, we propose that transformational leaders raise feelings of organizational identification in followers and that this form of identification then helps individuals to develop creativity in jobs with little routinization. This is because organizational members evaluate and promote those ideas as more creative, which are in line with a shared understanding of creativity within the organization. To investigate these relationships, we calculated a mediated moderation model with 173 leader–follower dyads from China. Results confirm our hypotheses that transformational leadership moderates the relationship between job non‐routinization on employee creativity through organizational identification. We conclude that raising feelings of social identity is a key task for leaders today, especially when working in uncertain and fast developing environments with little repetition and the constant need to develop creative ideas.     

Pro‐active neutrality: The key to understanding creative facilitation

Facilitation is a critical means of supporting creative processes in teams. Previous studies have shown that neutrality is central to effective facilitation but no clear conceptualization of neutrality has been provided to date. The aim of this paper is to explore how neutrality is enacted by facilitators, what its key elements and mechanisms are, and how it is perceived in the creative facilitation context. We adopt a theory building mode and conduct an in‐depth case study, following an innovation project in the IT sector with a series of facilitated creativity workshops. Our results show that neutrality is a multi‐dimensional construct that interacts with several outcome dimensions of facilitation, i.e. people, process, and product. We introduce a pro‐active neutrality framework, which explains the mechanisms of neutrality in facilitation and thereby extend theory on both neutrality and facilitation. We further outline a number of propositions that could be explored by future research as well as provide important creativity management implications that will enhance creativity and innovation in the workplace.     

Fortune Favours Only the Prepared Mind: Why Sources of Inspiration are Essential for Continuing Creativity

Intellectual health like physical health depends on a balance between feeding and exercise. But the demands of work often make a healthy balance very hard to maintain. In a detailed study of the knitwear industry and in comparisons with other design fields, we have observed that designers use external sources of ideas for a variety of different purposes throughout the design process. We have also observed that designers’ creative potential is often limited by the failure of managers to understand design, and especially their designers’ need to search for sources of new ideas. Managing design processes to maximize creative output requires both an understanding of the role of sources of ideas in the creative process, and proactive management to support and encourage the renewal of intellectual resources. In this paper we suggest some practical steps for supporting continuing creativity.     

Flourishing creativity in software development via Internetware paradigm

While culture being the software controlling human mind, computer software development becomes one of the most creative activities that human undertake since the civilisation began. The only limitation in software creation is human imagination, and that limit is often self-imposed. The “Internetware”, referring to a software paradigm, aims to satisfy the need of human kind using Internet as an integrated development and execution platform. Such software systems are composed of entities distributed through the Internetwork, allowing connections that would be impossible or difficult to make otherwise. One of the tasks for the Internetware is to accommodate creativity, to understand the general settings of creative design process and to develop programs that can enhance creativity without necessarily being creative themselves. Therefore, it can be summarized that a development environment needs to be built to best support software creation process of six steps including searching, ideating, specifying, coding, testing and evolving. An E-Health application eco-system is used to illustrate the proposed development process model.     

The Psychoeconomic View of Creative Work in Groups and Organizations

Although most research on creativity deals only with individuals, there are many settings in which creative tasks are assigned to groups. Indeed, in most contemporary research settings collaborative inquiry is the norm. Extensions to the psychoeconomic theory of creativity provide several specific predictions about the nature and optimization of group creativity. These predictions are based on consideration of the ways in which some individual differerences in creative style, such as domain experience and flexibility of thinking, are likely to interact. Instead of characterizing such attributes as conducive or harmful to the creative process, the psychoeconomic theory explicitly recognizes their potential for contributions in both directions. In particular, the theory implies that groups should be composed of heterogeneous participants who vary in their experiences within the domain in question, and who are only moderately familiar with one another, for most successful creative performance. This proposal is contrary to several theories which imply greater success from more congenial and symmetric groups. The theory also yields detailed predictions for how the optimal composition of a creative group should vary in response to changes in the characteristics of the group's members and the structure of its working environment.     

Understanding design fundamentals: how synthesis and analysis drive creativity,resulting in emergence

This paper presents results of an ongoing interdisciplinary study to develop a computational theory of creativity for engineering design. Human design activities are surveyed, and popular computer-aided design methodologies are examined. It is argued that semiotics has the potential to merge and unite various design approaches into one fundamental theory that is naturally interpretable and so comprehensible in terms of computer use. Reviewing related work in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science provides a general and encompassing vision of the creativity phenomenon. Basic notions of algebraic semiotics are given and explained in terms of design. This is to define a model of the design creative process, which is seen as a process of semiosis, where concepts and their attributes represented as signs organized into systems are evolved, blended, and analyzed, resulting in the development of new concepts. The model allows us to formally describe and investigate essential properties of the design process, namely its dynamics and non-determinism inherent in creative thinking. A stable pattern of creative thought — analogical and metaphorical reasoning — is specified to demonstrate the expressive power of the modeling approach; illustrative examples are given. The developed theory is applied to clarify the nature of emergence in design: it is shown that while emergent properties of a product may influence its creative value, emergence can simply be seen as a by-product of the creative process. Concluding remarks summarize the research, point to some unresolved issues, and outline directions for future work.     

An Exploratory Study of Entrepreneurial Creativity: Its Antecedents and Mediators in the Context of UAE Firms

In this study, we attempt to advance our understanding of the role of entrepreneurial creativity in the context of firms in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Through field research accompanied by a review of the related literature, this study identifies crucial antecedents of entrepreneurial creativity. The proposed model combines variables belonging to different contextual factors such as external factors (resource access, resource possession, and alertness to opportunity) and individual factors (creative self‐efficacy, expertise and intrinsic motivation). The model is tested using data from a large‐scale survey of firms in the UAE. We find that expertise and creative self‐efficacy is significantly related to entrepreneurial creativity. The results also reveal that intrinsic motivation and alertness to opportunity are the key mediators between contextual factors and entrepreneurial creativity. The findings of this study present some interesting practical implications to entrepreneurs in order to improve their creative skills.     

Provoking creativity: imagine what your requirements could be like

Requirements engineering isn't recognized as a creative process. However, as new systems and products emerge, stakeholders are increasingly creating and inventing ideas that they express as requirements. Requirements engineering, with its focus on elicitation, analysis, and management, has yet to fully grasp this trend. We applied techniques to encourage creative thinking during the requirements process for a software-based system in a naturally conservative domain - air traffic management (ATM). We applied unusual theories, such as analogical reasoning from cognitive science, to underpin the use of these techniques, and we report basic results and lessons learned. We focus on the creativity techniques we applied (see the sidebar) and demonstrate them with examples from the ATM domain.     

A Theoretical Framework Linking Creativity,Empowerment, and Organizational Memory

Empowerment, creativity, and organizational memory are constructs that have been researched in MIS. While each construct has received individual attention, we have found relatively little research linking them. One of the major edicts of empowerment is delegation of decision making authority to lower-level employees. Increased authority allows employees more freedom to be creative. However, if creative thought is generated but not captured, innovative ideas may be lost. Organizational memory can capture creative ideas as they are generated so that empowered teams can draw upon positive creative experiences. We developed a theoretical model to illuminate the relationships between organizational memory, worker empowerment, and creativity. The model portrays the linkages between empowerment and creativity, creativity and organizational memory, and organizational memory and empowerment. The model was developed based on the literature in each respective area and an interview-based study concerning “empowered” systems development project teams and organizational memory. Analysis of the interview data revealed that empowered workers generate creative solutions to problems. However, creative solutions can only be used for future projects if they are somehow recorded into organizational memory. Organizations that empowered their workforce and embraced creativity reported increased customer satisfaction, waste reduction, and some quality gains. In contrast, those that did not empower reported little or no change. Organizations that recorded creative solutions to problems believe that retrieval of this information could be potentially useful for future projects. Potential challenges faced by organizations classified into each cell are also presented. This classification scheme should prove useful as a guide to organizations examining the potential benefits and pitfalls of worker empowerment and organizational memory.     

Taking Style On Board (or how to get used to the idea of creative adaptors and uncreative innovators)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential impact of Kirton's Adaption-Innovation Theory on our thinking about creativity, and consequently on the practices of researchers and trainers in this field. That people differ in their degree or level of creativity has long been established. Kirton's work asserts that people also differ in the manner in which they express their creativity—their style, and the KAI (the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory) measures a person's preferred style. In the literature, Style and Level of creativity are argued (and mostly shown) to be independent. It follows from this that Adaptors and Innovators are creative (and uncreative) in different ways. It is suggested that much of the work in the creativity field has focused on the Innovative style of creativity. This paper describes research identifying differences in how Adaptors and Innovators view their creative products, looks at some possible implications for training, explores differences in preferred organisational climate between Adaptors and Innovators, and suggests a style-neutral definition of creativity.     

Constraints that Help or Hinder Creative Performance: A Motivational Approach

Threatening situations, in which people fear negative outcomes or failure, evoke avoidance motivation. Avoidance motivation, in turn, evokes a focused, systematic and effortful way of information processing that has often been linked to reduced creativity. This harmful effect of avoidance motivation on creativity can be problematic in financially turbulent times when people fear for their jobs and financial security. However, particularly in such threatening times, creativity may be crucial to innovate, adapt to changing demands and stay ahead of competitors. Here, I propose a theoretical framework describing how different types of constraints in the workplace affect creative performance under approach and avoidance motivation. Specifically, under avoidance motivation, constraints that consume or occupy cognitive resources should undermine creativity, but constraints that channel cognitive resources should facilitate creativity. Understanding the impact of different types of constraints on creative performance is needed to develop strategies for maximizing creativity in the workplace.     

Creative Potential and Practised Creativity: Identifying Untapped Creativity in Organizations

This study examines the construct validity of creative potential and practised creativity, two overlooked aspects of creativity that may be useful for identifying untapped creative resources in organizations. Results of an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) utilizing structural equation modelling techniques provide some initial evidence in support of the construct validity of these concepts. These findings appear to have important managerial implications for increasing creativity and overall organizational effectiveness. The results presented here also suggest some directions for future research aimed at examining the relationships between creative potential, practised creativity and other variables of interest.     

Hierarchical reinforcement learning as creative problem solving

Although creativity is studied from philosophy to cognitive robotics, a definition has proven elusive. We argue for emphasizing the creative process (the cognition of the creative agent), rather than the creative product (the artifact or behavior). Owing to developments in experimental psychology, the process approach has become an increasingly attractive way of characterizing creative problem solving. In particular, the phenomenon of insight, in which an individual arrives at a solution through a sudden change in perspective, is a crucial component of the process of creativity.These developments resonate with advances in machine learning, in particular hierarchical and modular approaches, as the field of artificial intelligence aims for general solutions to problems that typically rely on creativity in humans or other animals. We draw a parallel between the properties of insight according to psychology and the properties of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) systems for embodied agents. Using the Creative Systems Framework developed by Wiggins and Ritchie, we analyze both insight and HRL, establishing that they are creative in similar ways. We highlight the key challenges to be met in order to call an artificial system “insightful”.