We walk the line: Icons provisional appearances on virtual whiteboards trigger elaborative dialogue and creativity

Collaborative groupwork is a key creativity tool in industry. Digital Creativity Support Systems (CSS) have become a critical catalyst of distributed creative processes. Under laboratory conditions, this interaction design study uses an experiment to investigate the impact of apparent icon finishedness as a social affordance for elaborative dialogue, and enhanced creativity. The experiment examines the idea generation processes of 37 pairs of active managers using a synchronous CSS. Apparent finishedness is a purely presentational factor - it is completely separate from the actual substance of an idea. The results show that presenting ideas with icons made of sketchy natural lines with low perceived finishedness encourages elaborative dialogue and creativity. Low perceived finishedness icons functioned as a social affordance - they afforded the social behaviour of building upon each other's ideas as well as more creative idea generation. This is the first study to quantitatively examine the perceived finishedness of icons. This study shows that minor changes in visual treatments significantly impact creative processes and outcomes. As co-constructive interaction is central to many collaborative behaviours across working and learning, this study has clear implications for the subtle encouragement of co-construction in computer-mediated communication.