Creativity Loading – Please Wait! Investigating the Relationship between Interruption, Mind Wandering and Creativity

Abstract

With the advancement of information technologies, routine tasks are increasingly supported by information systems, which is why ideation and creativity is becoming more and more important. We know from many anecdotes that creative ideas emerge when our mind is wandering instead of being focused on the task at hand. Yet, most information systems that are used for work-related purposes offer only little opportunities for task-unrelated thoughts. In contrast, current literature shows that most information technology is designed to keep our attention. In order to better understand the value of mind wandering, we propose an experimental design that incorporates interruptions that vary in their length with the objective to stimulate episodes of mind wandering and thus positively impact creativity. We provide initial insights on how the experiment should designed and discuss implications for future research.

On How Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation While Using Information Technology: A Research Agenda for Robust Triangulation

“…The experimental procedure will replicate the work by Baird et al [13]. Based on our past research [30][31][32][33][34], we propose to add neurophysiological measures, namely EEG and eye-tracking, to experience samplings [20,30,[50][51][52]. The combination of self-reported information with the detailed measures of neural function promises to shed critical light on aspects of spontaneous thought while using IT.…”

“…Only in the last decade have studies highlighted its advantages, which include more-effective brain processing, pattern recognition, and associative thinking as well as increased creativity [13,15,20,28,29]. Recent IS research shows that MW relates to enjoyment [30,31], creativity [13,32] as well as performance and knowledge retention [20,33,34].…”

Interactivity Matters – A Role of Interactive Representations in Knowledge Transfer During Participatory Design Workshops

“…Our pilot study aims to get closer to understanding BA use from the users' perspective. Our starting point is to endorse two propositions: first that creativity is understood as the generation of novel and useful ideas or solutions (Baskerville et al, 2016;Shao et al, 2021;Wang & Nickerson, 2019), and second, that is understood as the ability to form new and meaningful combinations of available resources (Baumgart et al, 2020;Sher et al, 2020). Drawing from these explanations, we would like to delineate the role of creativity in BA use, which in practice could be perceived, i.e., when users using BA strive to elaborate meaningful information for decision-making or search solutions for various data quality or integration challenges in BA, or when they select appropriate data visualization and its design.…”