Something that came up pretty quickly when researching creativity in general was different techniques for idea generation, for example Kreativitätstechniken. While there are some like brainstorming that include more than one person, most of them do not specify the amount of people working on it or how it can be beneficial to do it in a social setting. For this I am excluding things like the 7 Hats, since the still are very structured in which positions to support and don’t create an open social environment.
Ways in which creative solutions can benefit from social environments is not only that there is more input to work with, and ideas bouncing off of each other, but also, how Gerhard Fischer calls it in his Paper »Social Creativity: Making All Voices Heard«, a social perspective. With this, he describes the benefitial nature for a project that comes from a setting where every participant is able to contribute their opinion. Not only about design in specific, but in my mind this relates a lot to for example solutions for a poster meant to be in public space, that might not be working for everyone, similar to a focus group or usability testing. He specifically goes into the right setting for this to work on a media level.
“To achieve and support social creativity is not only a technical problem; it requires new cultures and new mindsets. Making all voices heard requires socio-technical environments that provide people with powerful media to express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. The complexity of design problems transcends the individual human mind by requiring the integration between individual and social creativity. Our work has only scratched the surface of exploiting the power of collective minds equipped with new media. The challenges of the complex problems that we all face make this approach not a luxury, but a necessity.” (p.7)
