This paper focuses on the creative side of collaboration and constructs a support system that enhances designers’ creativity during collaborative design projects. In order to support creative group activity during such endeavors, the support system proposed here enables design team members to visualize the interactive communication processes during creative group activity from two viewpoints, one global, and the other local. In the global view of communication flow, the transition of topics and relationships between topics are visualized, whereas in the local view, the details of each communication process can be visualized. Both these types of visualization have two inherent merits. The first is to help designers clearly understand the flow of interactive communication processes and enable them to effectively balance two concurrent actions: their individual creative thinking, and their intercommunication with fellow design team members. The second merit stems from sharing the process of exploring new ideas. Generally, the discovery and initial germination of new ideas is done alone, via individual cogitation, and the sharing of individual explorative processes and areas of exploration is often difficult. However, the visualization procedure proposed in this paper can represent such processes and areas at a useful level of detail, so that team members can cooperatively explore new ideas as a group and derive synergistic benefits. Thus, the two merits of the proposed system can lead to more effective and efficient creative group activity.

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