Groupware for Design: An Interactive System to Facilitate Creative Processes in Team Design Work

Creativity as modeled using the recluse genius paradigm fails to recognize the necessity and value of the collaborative aspects involved. Enhancing the creative output of teams will become more and more necessary as the complexity of problems increases; this is especially true within the design domain. This paper explores the group processes and accompanying bottlenecks related to design work. Individuals and teams with experience in collocated design settings were studied to extract principles and best practices for group design work. Based on the findings, a set of design implications were extracted and an early prototype of a collaborative system was built to implement those conclusions. The tool attempts to model the highly effective ways that design teams work in a collocated environment while also addressing some of the bottlenecks they face.