Knowledge generation for enhancing design creativity through co-creative Virtual Learning Communities

With the current technological explosion, the arrival of Web 2.0 and the growth of ICTs, designers' tools can be understood and used by novice users. With this statement in mind, and considering previous works that claim that team-working enhances creativity, the present paper reports on an experiment conducted to test whether a large group of creative people organised in a Virtual Learning Community are able to produce a Graphic Design with a satisfactory level of creativity starting from an almost complete lack of knowledge on the discipline, where a “satisfactory level of creativity” is understood as being that level which can be achieved by an individual with specific knowledge in the subject working in isolation. The results were assessed by means of an adapted questionnaire based on the CPSS taxonomy, and statistically analysed using ANOVA. The conclusions appear to reinforce the idea that virtual team-working enhances creativity, but the lack of specific competence training can be discerned by an expert eye.