Supporting Creative Group Processes – Design Principles for Appropriate Groupware

Creative work is often conducted in distributed groups. Therefore information exchange is frequently facilitated by groupware systems. However, group work suffers from several losses such as information overload, production blocking, free riding, evaluation apprehension and production matching and yet has not been tailored to the need of creative work. In order to reduce these losses and to best support creative group processes (CGP), we propose a framework which combines a) the stages of the creative process, b) the potential losses of creative group processes and c) different media characteristics drawn from the Media Synchronicity Theory to formulate groupware design principles. We conclude that idea generation should be supported by asynchronous groupware functionality whilst idea evaluation merits from synchronous functionality.