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We designed a tabletop brainwriting interface to examine the effects of time pressure and social pressure on the creative performance. After positioning this study with regard to creativity research and human activity in dynamic environments, we present our interface and experiment. Thirty-two participants collaborated (by groups of four) on the tabletop brainwriting task under four conditions of time pressure and two conditions of social pressure. The results show that time pressure increased the quantity of ideas produced and, to some extent, increased the originality of ideas. However, it also deteriorated user experience. Besides, social pressure increased quantity of ideas as well as motivation, but decreased collaboration. We discuss the implications for creativity research and Human–Computer Interaction. Anyhow, our results suggest that the Press factor, operationalized by Time- or Social-pressure, should be considered as a powerful lever to enhance the effectiveness of creative problem solving methods.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) considers innovation as essential to economic growth and to competitiveness, particularly in western countries. Innovation can be defined as an invention, or a new product, that meets a commercial success (Perrin, 2001). To manage this combination of invention and adequacy to the market, the top five methods used in industrial companies include creativity techniques (invention) as well as market analysis, cost analysis and methods for comparing solutions (Geis, Bierhals, Schuster, Badke-Schaub, & Birkhofer, 2008). Hence the development of effective creativity techniques appears crucial for industrial innovation. The general aim of our research is to improve such creativity techniques. For this purpose, we will present in this article three contributions. The first one is a conceptual contribution, focused on improving creativity through the Press factor. This is an original and challenging approach, which has been poorly investigated in the creativity literature. Hence we also refer to the domain of human performance in dynamic environments to better understand the effects of pressure. The second contribution is an operational one, taking the aforementioned conceptual elaboration as a basis for the design of a computer mediated tabletop interface for group creativity. This interface includes graphical artifacts implementing two kinds of pressures: time pressure and social pressure. This kind of contribution is also original in the creativity literature, which usually focuses on methods rather than on interactive tools to support groupwork. Finally, the third contribution is an experimental one, allowing us to quantify the effects of our implementation of pressure on three kinds of variables: in this respect we provide new knowledge about the potential impact of pressure on (1) performance to the creative task, (2) collaboration behavior, and (3) subjective experience of participants.

We showed that to some extent, explicit time pressure can stimulate creativity: in a brainwriting task, time pressure can help increase quantity of ideas, and enhance originality (number of unique ideas). We are not suggesting that time pressure stimulates all kinds of creativity: designers, scientists, and everyone expected to be creative, should not be placed under time pressure in their everyday work, of course. But the possibility that time pressure could speed up the creative process like it was shown to speed up other cognitive mechanisms should not always be ruled out in the literature. In this respect, our experiment provides a new viewpoint on creative process.