Shneiderman, B. (2007). Creativity support tools: Accelerating discovery and innovation. Communications of the ACM 50(12), 20-32.

This articlegives an overview of creativity support and what that means in terms of research and in building software tools. Of course, this is something that is very important to me, but I think we still have a ways to go. And there are a lot of different types of creativity — artistic creativity, scientific creativity, just plain radical thinking about existing problems. It seems like there are a lot of points at which support is needed — which of those points are under the information science umbrella?

Well obviously in the search/exploration phase. Shneiderman mentions annotation and faceted search specifically. I am particularly frustrated by how difficult (read impossible) it is to have a single annotation system that can handle multiple file formats. So I can annotate straight HTML pages using one of a number of different Firefox plugins — but what happens when I get to a PDF? It doesn’t help me to have a different annotation system for each different file format. They all need to be accessible from the same interface.

Then if you had robust annotations, they could be used in concert with the annotated content to structure richer “more like this” searches. So that you could build up a collection over time of background material.

So this would support more structured creativity of the scientific discovery variety, as would different kinds of information visualizations. I am less clear on where IS fits into the world of artistic creativity support, I’ll have to cogitate on that for a while.