How to enhance creativity, especially by applying new technologies to creativity methods, is a question posed continuously by researchers. One reason for this is that creativity is an important part of people's daily lives and an essential component of society. Therefore, many methods to enhance creativity have been created, especially brainstorming, which is one of the most popular and effective tools that inspire individuals to generate ideas, hence enhancing creativity. Moreover, technologies, such as virtual reality (VR), provide an opportunity for individuals and groups to be creative. In response, recent studies have adopted VR in brainstorming to enhance creativity. However, there is a lack of systematic analysis of experimental approaches and creativity measures employed in this context. Addressing this question, this study categorized existing articles on the topic related to categories of avatars, environments, interfaces, or applications. The findings elaborate on trends, measures employed to evaluate creativity and idea generation, identified categories, and results of these studies.

This paper examines the immediate effects of group methods in facilitating remote team collaboration. We recruited seven teams with prior experience working together. All teams completed two current, complex, and open-ended design challenges using remote tools. We examined design activities before and after teams were given a design method intervention. The interventions were a Brainstorming Method to promote divergent thinking and the Five-Whys method to promote analytical thinking. Using OpenFace, we observed changes in emotion by examining facial expressions. We found that the brainstorming intervention did not have a change in ideation performance and the problem analysis intervention had a decrease in ideation performance. Teams used digital media to facilitate communication but were constrained by the media's tools. Our results can inform teams in organizations interested in promoting divergent thinking to not expect immediate improvements in ideation performance following the introduction of a design method. Future research is required to identify relevant abilities and social skills needed to facilitate remote ideation through design methods.

Funding agencies are increasingly seeking team-based approaches to tackling complex research questions, but there is a need to mobilize translational teams and create shared visions and strategic action plans long before specific funding opportunities are considered or even released. This is particularly evident for teams who want to pursue large-scale grants, where cross-disciplinary synergy is often required. In response, we created Research Jams, which are engaging yet structured brainstorming sessions that bring together groups for the first time to collectively generate novel research ideas, critically map the future of initiatives, prioritize opportunities and next steps, and build community. Research Jams leveraged various aspects of design thinking, including divergence and convergence, visual thinking, and amplifying diversity. We piloted seven Research Jams for a collective 129 researchers, staff, and partners across 50 University of Michigan units and external organizations. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with the vast majority of survey respondents indicating that the sessions were helpful for surfacing shared ideas or visions and that opportunities emerged they would like to pursue. Research Jams were ideal for cross-disciplinary groups who wanted to collaboratively ideate and strategize around complex problems in translational research. Importantly, these models have the potential for implementation with groups in any disciplinary domain who want to spur collaborations to address challenging problems. Our ultimate goal is for Research Jams to be the first intervention within a comprehensive support pathway that extends from early brainstorming all the way to grant submission.

The research presented in this paper explores how engineering students cognitively manage concept generation and measures the effects of additional dimensions of sustainability on design cognition. Twelve first-year and eight senior engineering students generated solutions to 10 design problems. Half of the problems included additional dimensions of sustainability. The number of unique design solutions students developed and their neurocognitive activation were measured. Without additional requirements for sustainability, first-year students generated significantly more solutions than senior engineering students. First-year students recruited higher cortical activation in the brain region generally associated with cognitive flexibility, and divergent and convergent thinking. Senior engineering students recruited higher activation in the brain region generally associated with uncertainty processing and self-reflection. When additional dimensions of sustainability were present, first-year students produced fewer solutions. Senior engineering students generated a similar number of solutions. Senior engineering students required less cortical activation to generate a similar number of solutions. The varying patterns of cortical activation and different number of solutions between first-year and senior engineering students begin to highlight cognitive differences in how students manage and retrieve information in their brain during design. Students’ ability to manage complex requirements like sustainability may improve with education.

This paper seeks to make a theoretical and empirical case for the importance of differentiated identities for group function. Research on groups has found that groups sometimes perform better and other times perform worse than the sum of their individual members. Differentiation of selves is a crucial moderator. We propose a heuristic framework that divides formation of work or task groups into two steps. One step emphasizes shared common identity and promotes emotional bonds. In the other step, which we emphasize, group members take increasingly differentiated roles that improve performance through specialization, moral responsibility, and efficiency. Pathologies of groups (e.g., social loafing, depletion of shared resources/commons dilemmas, failure to pool information, groupthink) are linked to submerging the individual self in the group. These pathologies are decreased when selves are differentiated, such as by individual rewards, individual competition, accountability, responsibility, and public identification. Differentiating individual selves contributes to many of the best outcomes of groups, such as with social facilitation, wisdom-of-crowds effects, and division of labor. Anonymous confidentiality may hamper differentiation by allowing people to blend into the group (so that selfish or lazy efforts are not punished), but it may also facilitate differentiation by enabling people to think and judge without pressure to conform. Acquiring a unique role within the group can promote belongingness by making oneself irreplaceable.

The purpose of this work is to test the chief principle of brainstorming, formulated as “quantity generates quality.” The study is included within a broad program whose goal is to detect the strong and weak points of creative techniques. In a sample of 69 groups, containing between 3 and 8 members, the concurrence of two commonly accepted criteria was established as a quality rule: originality and utility or value. The results fully support the quantity-quality relation (r = .893): the more ideas produced to solve a problem, the better quality of the ideas. The importance of this finding, which supports Osborn's theory, is discussed, and the use of brainstorming is recommended to solve the many open problems faced by our society.

The method known as the analysis of interconnected decision areas (AIDA) has been in use for nearly 40 years, but has made little headway into engineering design. This paper describes an implementation of AIDA that is useful to engineering designers wishing to combine the solution principles of various subfunctions within a product in new ways. Traditionally, the method is used to understand how one decision affects the options available to other decisions in a large-scale project. The method is to be used interactively with designers participating in a brainstorming session so that ideas are added to AIDA and immediately combined with other compatible ideas. The existing implementation has been tested in a classroom setting in which upper level undergraduates have successfully used the AIDA method along with numerous of design methods to solve conceptual design problems.