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Understanding design as a social creative process

Published: 12 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

The Human-Computer Interaction community has long been concerned with design. Terms such as 'creativity' and 'innovation' are frequently used when referring to the design process and in this paper we examine what creativity is with respect to design. Design is often a collaborative and, therefore, a social activity. We review the evolution of definitions of creativity, leading to our proposal of a unified definition, we present a theoretical account of why social creativity should in principle be more productive than individual creativity. We explain findings to the contrary in terms of three social influences on creativity and suggest that research in supporting design should focus on mitigating the effects of these social influences on the creativity of design teams.

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cover image ACM Conferences
C&C '05: Proceedings of the 5th conference on Creativity & cognition
April 2005
334 pages
ISBN:1595930256
DOI:10.1145/1056224
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 12 April 2005

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Author Tags

  1. creative problem solving
  2. creative process models
  3. creativity
  4. social creativity

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C&C '05
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C&C '05: Creativity and Cognition 2005
April 12 - 15, 2005
London, United Kingdom

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