Domain-oriented Design Environments: Supporting Individual and Social Creativity

Design is a ubiquitous activity. People can be creative in any sphere of life pursuing design activities. For the last decade, we have been engaged in the development of domain-oriented design environments to enhance individual creativity in a variety of different design domains. Based on the fact that the individual human mind is limited, extensions to our earlier approaches are presented, describing conceptual frameworks and innovative systems in support of social creativity. The conceptual framework is grounded in distributed cognition, organizational learning, and organizational memories. Derived from this conceptual framework, requirements for computational environments supporting social creativity are described, including the necessity for open systems; the seeding, evolutionary growth and reseeding model; and new conceptualizations of the World Wide Web. Specific system components and applications illustrate the implications of these assumptions and requirements. Experiences and assessments of these efforts describe the progress achieved over the last decade in our understanding of creativity and its computational support.