Steven Entezari October 4th, 2011

Identifying Creativity within Complex Work Environments Workspace awareness is the understanding of other group-members 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 highresolution 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 dont 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 members 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 process by 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.

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.