Supporting creativity: Investigating the role of awareness in distributed collaboration
Open Access
- Author:
- Farooq, Umer
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 20, 2008
- Committee Members:
- John Millar Carroll, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
C Lee Giles, Committee Member
Christopher Hoadley, Committee Member
Mary Beth Rosson, Committee Member
James Lewis Farr, Committee Member
Rosalie Ocker, Committee Member - Keywords:
- creativity
awareness
human computer interaction
computer supported cooperative work - Abstract:
- Creativity is the cornerstone of collaborative scientific work. As distributed collaboration is becoming an increasingly dominant model of creative scientific work that goes on in our daily lives, it is essential to understand how creativity can be supported in such contexts. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the feasibility, effectiveness, and consequences of supporting creativity with computer-supported awareness in distributed collaboration. This research is conducted in five phases. The first phase is a survey of creativity literature to speculate how awareness, and in particular activity awareness, can support creativity in distributed collaboration. The second phase is an exploratory experiment that identifies four breakdowns in creativity in distributed collaboration. The third phase is the design and prototyping of three novel activity awareness strategies and mechanisms to support creativity. The fourth phase is a main experiment that studies the effectiveness and consequences of using the activity awareness mechanisms. The fifth phase validates results from the main experiment through follow-up analysis. The results show that groups with activity awareness support were more likely to be among the most creative than groups without activity awareness support. 62% of the groups with activity awareness support were ranked in the upper tier of being creative versus 37.5% of the groups without activity awareness support. The most significant results involved structured activity updates, one of the three activity awareness mechanisms, which allowed group members to update and share their work status. The structured activity updates increased awareness of group members with respect to what they had worked on. Further, the structured activity updates increased awareness of group members over time with respect to what they will do next, a relationship that was stronger for the groups with structured activity updates than groups without structured activity updates. Group members with higher metacognitive knowledge found the structured activity updates more useful than group members with lower metacognitive knowledge. This dissertation contributes to the basic science of creativity, to the design science of supporting creative activity, and to the empirical science of measuring creativity. The application of creativity theories from the social sciences in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) contexts improves our general understanding of creative collaboration. Second, prototypes of awareness mechanisms broaden the science of design by developing new tools for supporting creativity. Third, extension of existing evaluation metrics and frameworks advances our ability to measure creativity using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The broader impact of this dissertation is to enhance the process and product of creative collaboration.