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IST Researchers Receive NSF Grant to Study Creativity
10/31/2007
by Margaret Hopkins
How can creativity be fostered? Can technology enhance people’s creative processes? If so, what technologies can support creativity? by Margaret Hopkins
These questions are at the heart of an NSF-funded study proposed by Umer Farooq, IST doctoral student, and Jack Carroll, the Edward M. Frymoyer Professor of Information Sciences and Technology. Using surveys and field experiments, the two researchers plan to examine if and how collaborative technologies can boost scientific creativity.
“As work becomes more online and more distributed, we need to learn how to tap sources of creativity,” Farooq said. “When we understand better people’s creative processes, then we can develop collaborative technologies to support them.”
For the study, Farooq and Carroll plan to leverage CiteSeer, initially a digital library but currently being redesigned to include collaborative technologies. The researchers will study CiteSeer users who are primarily computer and information scientists.
While creativity is central to scientific progress, the relationship between online collaboration and creativity in science is not well understood, Farooq said. Research has shown, for instance, that individual “aha” moments are only one facet of creativity with long-term social interactions providing another. That is why the researchers plan to explore how scientists engage with their community as they search for novel ideas and new solutions.
The researchers also are planning a field experiment in order to determine design requirements for support tools. These tools will address creative successes and breakdowns, Farooq said.
While the tools will be developed for Next Generation CiteSeer, they also could be incorporated into other Internet-based collaboration infrastructures, according to the researchers.
“Our goal is to understand what scientists need in order to become more creative,” Farooq said. “Once we know how they collaborate with each other online, pool their resources and feed each others’ ideas, then we can design support tools which increase people’s ability to be more creative.”
