Abstract Creative thinking is desirable in many professions. This article reports new research that followed a design science approach to develop and investigate a co‐creative tool called Sport Sparks in one profession – the coaching of professional football players. In response to a coach entering a text description of a coaching challenge (e.g., struggling to maintain the fitness of an athlete) into the tool, the tool automatically generated potentially novel ideas (e.g., reducing game time and changing their nutrition) that the coach could select and/or adapt and evolve into a simple action plan (e.g., which links nutrition to increased game time). This Sport Sparks tool was designed to be an example of human‐centred artificial intelligence that aspires to empower humans, to deliver high levels of human control as well as automation, and empower people rather than emulate their expertise. It was engineered with rule‐based reasoning to automate the generation of potential new ideas that coaches could select and refine during interactions which provide high user control over this automation. The potential of such a co‐creative tool, and value of the guidelines, were demonstrated during the tool's evaluation by coaching practitioners at a Premier League football club. The practitioners used the tool to generate new ideas to coaching challenges, and reported evidence of different forms of creative thinking, although some also reported the need for more support for creative collaborations and solution planning. The paper ends by discussing future directions for both the Sport Sparks tool and other co‐creative AI tools.

JECT.AI is a research-based digital tool that was developed to augment journalist creative thinking. It integrates natural language processing, creative search and interactive creative thinking guidance to support journalists to discover novel ideas, angles and voices when writing new articles. This technical demonstration paper summarises JECT.AI's architecture, algorithms and key interactive features.

What do news landscapes look and sound like? And how can we transform them into tangible objects to see clusters of over-reporting, or to hear the missing voices in under-reported topics? A new artwork called Fragile Perspectives was developed to explore how news coverage clusters for different themes. Using a very large news information set generated to explore creative angles and voices in news, new tangible objects of news landscapes were produced by clustering 10000s of individual news articles into 300 dimensions, then reducing these dimensions to 3-dimensional maps. These 3-dimensional maps were then manufactured as glass objects produced using the glassblowing techniques similar to those perfected on the Venetian island of Murano, then digitally scanned to excite virtual strings to produce the sound using a data sonification method based on physical modelling sound synthesis. These glass objects and the generated sound were combined to produce the Fragile Perspectives artwork.

Sport Sparks™ is a new digital tool that has been researched and developed to augment the creative thinking of sports coaches when resolving challenges experienced by athletes. Most sports coaches work across multiple training sites and have limited opportunities and resources for creative thinking. The Sport Sparks™ tool was designed to provide ready-to-use guidance for creative thinking, via mobile devices, that is generated using automated natural language processing, rule-based reasoning and creative search. This short technical demonstration paper summarises and demonstrates with examples the different strategies and features implemented in Sport Sparks™ to augment coach creative thinking.

Creativity’s importance to organisations and businesses is now recognised to be a precondition for both design and innovation. One strategy is to introduce new forms of information system that support human creative thinking by their employees. Most successful uses have been in professional disciplines in the creative industries such as design and theatre. This paper reports the design and evaluation of a new information system that was researched and developed to support human creativity in a non-creative industry – health-and-safety in a manufacturing plant. An established risk detection and resolution process in one plant was extended with the new system to support plant employees to think creatively about resolutions to health-and-safety risks. The new system was used in a manufacturing plant for over 3 months. Results revealed that a subset of the risk resolutions generated with the new system were more creative and more complete than risk resolutions generated without the system in a corresponding period. However, the employees needed more time than was available to generate more complete risk resolutions. The evaluation results led to coordinated changes to both the information system and work practices associated with it.

This paper reports the evaluation of a new digital support tool designed to increase journalist creativity and productivity in newsrooms. After outlining the tool's principles, interactive features and architecture, the paper reports the installation and use of the tool over 2 months by 12 journalists in the newsrooms of 3 newspapers. Results from this evaluation revealed that tool use was associated with published news articles rated as more novel but not more valuable than published articles written by the same journalists without the tool. However, tool use did not increase journalist productivity. The evaluation results were used to inform future changes to the digital creativity support tool.

There has been little research to investigate the impact of software to support the care for older people with dementia care. This article reports the evaluation of software adapted to support one key person-centered task for the care of older residents with dementia – recording and sharing daily care notes. The evaluation on the dementia wing of 1 residential home for over 6 months revealed that use of the software on mobile devices carried by the carers increased the number and volume of daily care notes recorded, but only for the types of content that were already being recorded by carers. Carers reported more advantages that resulted from daily care notes once in digital form than from the documenting task, as well as barriers to the use of mobile digital software to record daily care notes.

This paper reports the design and first evaluations of new digital support for journalists to discover and examine crea-tive angles on news stories under development. The support integrated creative news search algorithms, interactive crea-tive sparks and reusable concept cards into one daily work tool of journalists. The first evaluations of INJECT by jour-nalists in their places of work to write published news sto-ries revealed that the journalists generated new angles on existing stories rather than new stories, changed their writ-ing behaviour, and reported evidence that INJECT use had the potential to increase the objectivity and the boldness of journalism methods used.

This paper reports the results of research that sought the long-term uptake of digital support for human creativity to improve health-and-safety in 3 manufacturing plants over an 18-month period. The systematic risk detection and reso-lution processes of each plant were extended with digital support for employees to think creatively about resolutions to encountered health-and-safety risks. The different uses, successful and unsuccessful, revealed which digitized crea-tivity techniques were effective, different enablers for and barriers to the uptake of the digital creativity support in complex work places, and the importance of management support for aligning work practices and digital capabilities to support creative thinking.

This paper reports an evaluation of digital support for human creativity to improve health-and-safety in one manufacturing plant. It reports the use of this support as part of the plant's risk management process over 66 working days. Results revealed that this use led to more complete, more useful and more novel risk resolutions, compared with the original paper process, and informed how digital creativity support can be rolled out across manufacturing plants, as well as to other domains not recognized as creative.

This paper reports the development and deployment of digi-tal support for human creativity in a domain outside of the creative industries -- health-and-safety management in man-ufacturing plants. It reports applied research to extend a risk detection and resolution process at a world-class manufac-turing plant that produces tractors with creativity techniques and new digital support for the plant employees to use these techniques effectively as part of the risk detection and reso-lution process. The development of the digital support was constrained by the plant's processes, resources and manu-facturing culture, and the new digital support reported in this paper was designed for quick use across the plant with minimum training or management overhead. The paper reports the development, implementation and early evalua-tion of the creativity techniques and digital support in the plant as a demonstrator for the wider application of creativi-ty techniques and digital support tools.

There has been little research to develop computing technologies to support the care of people with dementia, in spite of the growing challenges that the condition poses for society. To design such technologies, an existing model of computer-support reflective learning was instantiated with findings from a pre-design study in one residential home. The result was a mobile device running an adapted enterprise social media app to support person-centred care. Evaluations of the device and app in two residential homes revealed that use of the app both motivated and increased different styles of care note recording, but little reflective learning was identified or reported. The results suggest the need for more comprehensive and flexible computer-based support for reflective learning about residents in their care – and new designs of this more comprehensive support are also introduced.

This paper reports a new mobile software app to support creative thinking by carers for people with dementia. The design of the app was informed by both pre-studies that demonstrated the potential of investigating challenging behaviors in non-care domains to improve person-centered care, and a model of creative problem solving adapted to dementia care. The resulting app implements different versions of the Other Worlds creativity technique to generate then reflect on ideas to improve resident care. An evaluation of the app in one residential home revealed that carers were able to use the app as described in the model, and deliver novel care to one resident in the home.

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study within a real-life context that investigates participant behaviour and emergent user roles in asynchronous distributed collaborative idea generation by a defined community of users. In the study, a high-fidelity prototype of an online virtual ideas room was built and used by a Community of Interest consisting of representatives from 10 different voluntary organisations spread across Denmark. The study revealed five user roles, which the authors propose that future asynchronous distributed collaborative idea generation platforms should consider.

This poster reports research to introduce creative problem solving techniques and software to the care for people with dementia in residential homes.

This vision paper frames requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. Its purpose is to enable requirements researchers and practitioners to recruit relevant theories, models, techniques and tools from creative problem solving to understand and support requirements processes more effectively. It uses 4 drivers to motivate the case for requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. It then maps established requirements activities onto one of the longest-established creative problem solving processes, and uses these mappings to locate opportunities for the application of creative problem solving in requirements engineering. The second half of the paper describes selected creativity theories, techniques, software tools and training that can be adopted to improve requirements engineering research and practice. The focus is on support for problem and idea finding - two creative problem solving processes that our investigation revealed are poorly supported in requirements engineering. The paper ends with a research agenda to incorporate creative processes, techniques, training and tools in requirements projects.

Service-centric software systems offer new opportunities for requirements processes. This paper reports a new tool designed to increase the completeness of system requirements using information about designs and implementations of web services. It presents an algorithm for retrieving web services in domains that are analogical to a current requirements problem, to support creative thinking about requirements for that problem. It describes how the algorithm parses and analogically matches natural language descriptions of system requirements and web service descriptions. The paper also reports 2 evaluations of the tool that demonstrate improvements to specifications of requirements for a system in the automotive domain.