Mar 1, 2010
Social creativity: turning barriers into opportunities for collaborative design (Fischer, 2004)
Social creativity: turning barriers into opportunities for collaborative design (Fischer, 2004)
Design problem complexity (requiring expertise in a wide range of domains) means that communities, not individuals, are needed for creative resolution.
Social nature of creativity:
The individual as the ‘almighty creator’ is an overused and overrated concept. Most creativity arises from interaction and collaboration – the relationships between the individual and the world/setting/socio-cultural context and the individual and other human beings.
Design communities face barriers:
1: Spatial – Physical distance still poses problems. Different stages/processes may require face-to-face interaction (e.g. dealing with ill-defined problems, building mutual trust). “Digital technologies are adept at maintaining communities already formed. They are less good at making them” (Brown and Duguid, 1991, cited).
BUT, digital technologies bring spatially disparate actors together, building relationships based more on similar concerns than proximity. Further, more and more varied people can be included, thus increasing the base of knowledge, skills, diversity essential to creative production.
E.g. open source software, Web2gether
2: Temporal – Mastering a domain in order to be able to transcend it is a key creative strategy. Many design projects are long, are continuously evolving and iterative. When people who were not members of the original team enter the mix, they often need to collaborate with the orignal designers. This means that they need to understand the rationale of and possible alternatives to the original solution (and that these were recorded in the first place). Closed system and designer biases against documentation make this difficult to acheive on a long-term basis. Further, project functionality needs to be adaptable over time.
BUT, long-term, indirect collaboration (Fischer et al., 1992, cited) systems that support communication about artifacts and context and rationale can help with this.
E.g. Environment and Discovery Collaboratory, Information-Ball (I-Balls)
3: Conceptual – Design communities often have a strict division of labour. This implies a diversity of experiences, interests, perspectives, knowledge systems etc. Shared understanding is important in solving problems in collaboration.
3.1: Within domain – Communities of Practice (COP) – Similar domains, similar work; but within each domain there are individuals with different experitise and skill levels. Long-term collaboration leads to boundaries (shared histories) between participants and non-participants even within the same domain. These may be empowering to in-groups, but barriers to entry for out-groups. While a ‘division of labour’ is powerful, real problems cannot usually be solved by one discipline alone.
3.2: Cross domain – Communities of Interest (COI) – Participants from different COPs together to solve a common problem; “communities of communities” (Brown and Duguid, 1991, cited). Building a shared understanding is a big challenge here. Members need to learn to communicate across different vocabularies, perspectives, belief systems.
3.3: Comparing COPs and COIs – Learning in a COI is more complex than, say on the periphary of a COP because COIs must support the autonomy of COPs and also facilitate interconnectedness. Learning in COPs = “learning where the answer is known”, learning in COIs = answer is often unknown. COIs = multiple centers of knowledge (each with less knowledge in other areas). See Table 2 for a summary of differences.
4: Technological Dimension – Designers construct design situations, and then listen to the ‘back-talk’ of the situation to reflect on their work. Computers (etc) can play an active role in this – analysing and ‘talking back’ to the designer. However, when this back-talk is presented in a way that is difficult to understand or insufficient, barriers occur. Critiquing systems (critics) (Fischer et al., 1998, cited) montior use and flag potential problems and solutions, as well as locating information which may be difficult to
find.
Discussion:
1: Overview: See Table 3 in original text
2: Power Users and the Fish-Scale Model – The power user model (Nardi, 1993, cited) encourages individuals to become experts in many fields – powerful but difficult to acheive. The fish-scale approach (Cambell, 1969, cited) – distributing disciplines over overlapping areas – may be more practical.
