JS Gero (ed), Design Computing and Cognition'04, 499-517 © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Printed in the Netherlands A COMPUTATIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE STUDY OF CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION IN DESIGN: EFFECTS OF SOCIAL TIES RICARDO SOSA, JOHN S GERO University of Sydney, Australia Abstract. This paper describes a socio-cognitive framework to study the interaction between designers and social groups. Experimentation with situational factors of creativity is presented. In particular, social ties in a population of adopters are shown to shape the way in which designers are considered as change agents of their societies. 1. Introduction Creative design is widely recognised as one of the foundations for social change (Gero 1996). This paper explores some fundamentals of the relationship between designers and social groups. Our motivation is to understand how individual actions can be determined by collective conditions and in turn trigger structural changes. Conventional research focuses on distinct units of analysis, i.e. personal or social processes separately (Conte et al 2001). An increasingly accepted approach to the study of creativity is based on the relation between individual-generative and group-evaluative processes. Under this view, creativity is seen as a social construct (Saunders and Gero 2001) or communal judgment (Gardner 1993) where the creative individual is considered not in isolation but in interaction with an environment of physical and social dimensions. Being socially constructed, standards of what constitutes creative solutions evolve (Simonton 2000). This requires a broader inquiry of design that extends the unit of study outside the cognitive dimension to include the social aspect of creativity (Amabile 1983). The term creativity is polysemous and ambiguous. In the literature it refers to aesthetic appeal, novelty, quality, unexpectedness, uncommonness, peer-recognition, influence, intelligence, learning, and popularity (Runco and Pritzker 1999). In this paper creativity is defined by a set of complementary processes including adoption of a solution by a population, nomination by specialists or gatekeepers and colleague recognition.