8/3/2019 Identifying Creativity within Complex Work Environments

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Steven Entezari

October 4th

, 2011

Identifying Creativity within Complex Work Environments

Workspace awareness is the understanding of other group-member’s real-time status and

preoccupation within a current, shared project (Gutwin & Greenburg, 1996). Through workspace

awareness and within co-located groups, co-creation emerges. Co-creation is the experience of 

forming creative products within a socio-technical environment, thus preserving face-to-face

interaction within a computer-supported work environment (Fischer, Giaccardi, Eden, Sugimoto,

& Ye, 2005). Socio-technical environments can include any large group displays, such as a high-

resolution tiled display shared amongst a team in a workspace.

The emergence of creativity within co-located, workspace-aware groups is a phenomenon that is

still not understood. Within these shared environments, it is necessary to identify contributors to

this emergence. While it may be a case in which the parts simply don’t add up to the whole, it is

still necessary to understand the interactions and rules within such a complex system to replicate

its desired effects. Currently little is known about the impact of workspace awareness on the

creativity of co-located groups. Some studies have been done to explore creativity within

workspace awareness of distributed groups (Farooq, Ganoe, & Carroll, 2007). These studies,

however, dismiss the importance of co-location and body-interactions present, and necessary, in

socio-technical environments. Work has also been done to determine that creativity can be

supported within co-located groups given the appropriate socio-technical environment and

context (Kulyk, 2010). However little has been done to identify and establish the appropriate

environments from various contexts to promote the emergence of co-creation.

To address this problem, we plan to explore and lineate the emergence of creativity, within a

complex-social-system, as the byproduct of workspace awareness and co-located groups

within socio-technical environments. For the purposes of identifying team interactions here, we

will focus on developing a creative software-product. These interactions will be looked at within

complex-social-systems, which consist of the team-members, groupware-technology, and the

shared-visualization of their ideas on the screen. There are two main aims to this research:

Aim 1: Identify the contributions of each interaction within the complex-social-system. The

use of high-resolution tiled-displays will allow us to identify fruitful interactions in the complex

system. Influences from team mem ber’s visualizations of ideas onto another individuals thought

process, via the shared display, will be of specific interest.

Aim 2: Construct a set of guidelines for developing creativity-inducing shared-workspaces.

Based on interactions identified within the complex-social-system, reverse-engineer the processby which these interactions were initiated and develop guidelines to design shared-workspaces

that focus on intuitively inducing creativity.

Being cognizant of the necessary and proven elements of a complex and shared environment,

teams can organize and structure their workspaces to maximize the provocation of creative ideas

and necessary elements for routine idea generation. Removing part, if not all, of the guesswork to

the design of a shared work environment focused on creativity will increase creativity without

increasing the need to force a creative outcome.

8/3/2019 Identifying Creativity within Complex Work Environments

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/identifying-creativity-within-complex-work-environments 2/2

Steven Entezari

October 4th

, 2011

Works Cited

Farooq, U., Ganoe, C. H., & Carroll, J. M. (2007). Supporting Creativity with Awareness in Distributed

Collaboration. Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work .

Fischer, G., Giaccardi, E., Eden, H., Sugimoto, M., & Ye, Y. (2005). Beyond Binary Choices: Integrating

Individual and Social Creativity. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies .

Gutwin, C., & Greenburg, S. (1996). Workspace Awareness for Groupware. Conference on Human

Factors Computing Systems , 208-209.

Kulyk, O. (2010). Do You Know What I Know? Situational Awareness of Co-located Teams in Multidisplay 

Environments Dissertation. Enschede: NBIC Publication.