ELSEVIER Knowledge-Based Systems 10 (1997) 1 2

Preface

Information Technology Support for Creativity

Knotoledge-lNased SVSTEMS'---

In the autumn of 1995, a symposium entitled 'Inter- national AI Symposium 95: Intelligent Design of Creative Society' was held in Nagoya, Japan. At that symposium, a workshop on 'Information Technology Support for Creativity' was held. A number of interest- ing papers on this topic were presented at the workshop. This is the origin of this special issue.

Recently, creativity has become one of the most important keywords in the wide area of academic and industrial research. It is natural that many people are attracted by this keyword because creativity seems to be the last domain of human activity that has not been scientifically studied enough and, at the same time, it is a most important issue for industry to help the develop- ment of products. However, creativity is too big a topic and no one has provided a total view of it as yet. Nor does this special issue claim to give a total view of creativity.

Creativity is not a single element of human activity but a complex of various processes. It includes many kinds of individual cognitive processes and many kinds of social interaction. The domain also varies from art to industry. No single process deserves to be called the central pro- cess of creativity. Accordingly, no single approach to the big problem of creativity deserves to be the correct approach and researchers have been trying various approaches. Some give anecdotal descriptions of creativ- ity, some analyse creativity by cognitive experiments, some provide cognitive models, some watch the social activity of people, etc. The common approach taken by the authors in this special issue is to study creativity by building systems to support it. The authors are investi- gating how human creativity changes when we provide people with computer support systems.

Since creativity is a complex mixture of various human activities, support systems naturally become a complex mixture of various support functions. Perhaps, we do not yet have an answer to the question 'What is the definition of creativity support?' If we wish to support human crea- tivity, perhaps, we must support all the human activities from individual cognition to social interaction. Then, is supporting creativity equal to, say, supporting profes- sional work? One answer may be yes: creativity support is just a combination of design support, manufacturing support, drawing support, communication support, col- laboration support, and so on. Another answer may be

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no: creativity support is more than a combination of various support systems.

I think these two answers distinguish the study on creativity support from other studies of CSCW (Com- puter Supported Cooperative Work), groupware, design support, hypermedia, etc. When we study creativity sup- port, I think we should adopt the latter answer. Even when professional work is totally supported by the com- bination of existing computer support systems, people may be creative or may not be creative. The central ques- tion we must consider when we build creativity support systems should be whether the systems can make people more creative with the support than without the support. The papers presented in this special section give different answers to this question.

Candy first surveys the wide area of studies on crea- tivity. Then she gives two case studies. There she dis- cusses the implications of knowledge intensive work including visualisation and collaboration. Kubota also considers the importance of collaboration among people with different backgrounds. He has built wooden furni- ture which can reflect mental space, for promoting the collaboration. Fischer and Nakakoji give a conceptual framework of creativity in the context of everyday practice of design and learning. They view design as reflection-in-action and breakdowns as opportunities for learning and creativity. They present a system for supporting multimedia information design based on their framework. Hori shares Fischer's claim that the creativity support must not be human-computer inter- action but human-problem domain interaction and that breakdown evokes creativity. Hori considers whether the support system can artificially cause breakdowns and promote creative thinking. He describes a case study of airplane design support. Noguchi also deals with the problem of design. He proposes methods for providing different view points of design sketches and for finding a meta-concept. He has evaluated the effectiveness of his support methods by experiments in an industrial design course at his university. Ohiwa built a system named KJ Editor which is a card handling tool. In Japan, KJ method, which is a card-based creativity support methodology (a kind of brainstorming), is widely used. He realised the methodology on a computer and tested the system by the experiments on software requirement

Koichi Hori/Knowledge-Based Systems lO (1997) 1 2

analysis. Sugiyama integrated the KJ method and other methods into a system named D-ABDUCTOR. The system supports a total process of generation/collection, organization and presentation of ideas. Kato and Kunifuji propose a support system for consensus mak- ing. They combined the KJ method with group decision support method.

I hope the readers enjoy seeing the various possibilities of creativity support in this special issue of Knowledge- Based Systems.

Koichi Hori Dept of Aeronautics and Astronautics

University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan