Enhance Creative Thinking by Collaborating with Designers

This paper reports a case study of training technology graduate students to think more creatively in a visual analytics system-design competition by collaborating with designers. In the summer of 2013, two faculty members led a team organized by technology and design graduate students to work on a visual analytics system design and won the only two awards of “Outstanding Creative Design.” To investigate and learn from this interdisciplinary collaboration experience, we purposely tracked and collected the design process information such as meeting minutes, white-board discussion photos, and development files at different stages from the very beginning of the collaboration for analysis and review. The paper reviews this 7-week design process and specifically focuses on observing how the technology students were influenced by their design peers, started to learn and adopt design methods, then accepted and generated “wild” design ideas by themselves. Furthermore, we also discuss and report faculty’s roles in this process and the types of strategies that drove the collaboration and fostered the creativity.