An Empirical Study of the Evolving Dynamics of Creative Teams in Action David Raisey Kuan Tan Paul Swatman Terence Blackburn Vivian Nguyen School of Computer and Information Science, University of South Australia {david.raisey, kuan.tan, paul.swatman, terence.blackburn, vivian.nguyen}@unisa.edu.au ABSTRACT The research programme which underlies this paper focuses on understanding the process of addressing “creative” or ill- structured problems – an economically significant process and one which pervades the professional lives of teams of professionals such as software engineers, managers and strategic planners. This class of problem is poorly understood and, consequently, there is little effective support (leverage without constraint on flexibility/creativity) currently available. In this paper, we present a preliminary study of creative teams in action – a study in which we have access to both data describing the dynamics of “evolution” of the focal artefact and data describing the process undertaken by the team. 1. INTRODUCTION Our overall research programme focuses on understanding the process of addressing “creative” or ill- structured problems. Such problems, which are pervasive in management and many professions, are often tackled by teams rather than individuals but are, in general, poorly understood. Consequently, there is little effective support (leverage without constraining flexibility/creativity) currently available. Characterising the work of creative teams as comprising “chains” of group “meetings” linked by periods during which participants work individually, we will implement automated collection and annotation of observational data from both socially- and ICT-mediated sources so that the resulting picture of the status of both the creative chain and each “meeting” at any point in time and the dynamics of their development to that point may be interrogated and utilised to: • identify potentially useful ICT support for classes of creative teams • evaluate the effect of the implementation of the suggested ICT intervention; and ultimately • orchestrate both automatically and manually, the reconfiguration of such an ICT-supported environment for creative work. Ultimately, we seek to develop a creative problem solving method 1 , based on the analysis of multi-modal observational data, through which we can develop a detailed model of the dynamics of a team’s working 1 An analogous “evaluation method” would, clearly, allow us to evaluate the effect, in practice, of any intervention we make in the support environment of the team.