Author ' s personal copy Dynamic tabletop interfaces for increasing creativity

We designed a tabletop brainwriting interface to examine the effects of time pressure and social pressure on the creative performance. After positioning this study with regard to creativity research and human activity in dynamic environments, we present our interface and experiment. Thirty-two participants collaborated (by groups of four) on the tabletop brainwriting task under four conditions of time pressure and two conditions of social pressure. The results show that time pressure increased the quantity of ideas produced and, to some extent, increased the originality of ideas. However, it also deteriorated user experience. Besides, social pressure increased quantity of ideas as well as motivation, but decreased collaboration. We discuss the implications for creativity research and Human–Computer Interaction. Anyhow, our results suggest that the Press factor, operationalized by Timeor Social-pressure, should be considered as a powerful lever to enhance the effectiveness of creative problem solving methods. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Goal of the research The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) considers innovation as essential to economic growth and to competitiveness, particularly in western countries. Innovation can be defined as an invention, or a new product, that meets a commercial success (Perrin, 2001). To manage this combination of invention and adequacy to the market, the top five methods used in industrial companies include creativity techniques (invention) as well as market analysis, cost analysis and methods for comparing solutions (Geis, Bierhals, Schuster, Badke-Schaub, & Birkhofer, 2008). Hence the development of effective creativity techniques appears crucial for industrial innovation. The general aim of our research is to improve such creativity techniques. For this purpose, we will present in this article three contributions. The first one is a conceptual contribution, focused on improving creativity through the Press factor. This is an original and challenging approach, which has been poorly investigated in the creativity literature. Hence we also refer to the domain of human performance in dynamic environments to better understand the effects of pressure. The second contribution is an operational one, taking the aforementioned conceptual elaboration as a basis for the design of a computer mediated tabletop interface for group creativity. This interface includes graphical artifacts implementing two kinds of pressures: time pressure and social pressure. This kind of contribution is also original in the creativity literature, which usually focuses on methods rather than on interactive tools to support groupwork. Finally, the third contribution is an experimental one, allowing us to quantify the effects of our implementation of pressure on three kinds of variables: in this respect we provide new knowledge about the potential impact of pressure on (1) performance to the creative task, (2) collaboration behavior, and (3) subjective experience of participants. 2. Overview on creativity Creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel and appropriate (Sternberg, 1998). As initially proposed by Rhodes (1961), creativity can be seen as a construct of four ‘‘Ps’’: Person, Process, Product, and Press. The Person component refers to the individual characteristics and personality traits correlating to creativity. Research on this component (see e.g. Bolin & Neuman, 2006; Feist, 1998) has shown that creativity can be influenced by certain personality traits such as psychoticism, social anxiety, openness, impulsivity, individualism, extroversion. The Process relates to the cognitive mechanisms of creativity. In this respect, the role of associative processes in divergent thinking and problem solving has been repeatedly emphasized (Nijstad & Stroebe, 2006; Runco, 2004), as well as the mechanisms related to group creativity, such as cognitive stimulation and social comparison (Dugosh & Paulus, 2005). The Product refers to the creativity outcomes and their evaluation criteria, with the assumption that studies of products like publications, paintings, poems, or designs are highly objective. 0747-5632/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.chb. 2012.05. 007 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: lara1168@hotmail.fr (L. Schmitt), stephanie.buisine@ ensam.eu (S. Buisine), jonathan.chaboissier@limsi.fr (J. Chaboissier), ameziane. aoussat@ensam.eu (A. Aoussat), frederic.vernier@limsi.fr (F. Vernier). Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012) 1892–1901