| In both design education and industry it is often assumed that collaboration encourages creativity, although research in brainstorming has shown that this is not always the case. There is an opportunity to develop more effective collaborative methods, based on research. This work lays the groundwork for new methods, by extending creative cognition to group creativity by proposing an interactive cognition approach. Specifically, designers' interactions, through questions and shared design entities, stimulate creativity relevant thought processes. Various types of collaborative stimulation are identified, namely, prompting, seeding, correcting, and clarifying. An experiment using collaborative retrospective protocol analysis was developed to determine if the hypothesized types of collaborative stimulation exist and how influential each type was by exploring stimulation patterns. Patterns were found between collaborative stimulation and thought processes, novelty of ideas, and analogies. Specifically, prompting had a strong relationship with memory retrieval, seeding and correcting had strong relationships with transformation, and clarifying had moderate to strong relationships with memory retrieval, association, and transformation. Also, seeding and correcting were found to create the most novel ideas. Additional patterns were found between the past creative experience of individuals and stimulation frequency, and designers were found to be stimulated more often in collaborative than individual settings. The implications of these patterns for developing new methods to promote group creativity are discussed. |
