Raoul Pilcicki

• Increasingly decentralized collaboration drives the development of new creativity support systems (CSS) that offer virtual teams various means for communication, information exchange, and creative collaboration. As CSS aim to mitigate the limitations of virtual communication and collaboration, reason suggests that more functionalities yield better outcomes. Hence, a wide range of capabilities for interaction, knowledge sharing, or innovative collaboration processes is implemented into these CSS. However, if CSS offer functionalities beyond the required level, they can become confusing to use, overload users, or cause feature fatigue. Previous research shows that having more options or functionalities does not always lead to better results, especially in the context of creativity, and suggests a curvilinear relationship between constraints and creativity. While the effects of constraints on creative collaboration have been studied in analogue settings before, their design and application to support creative collaboration in virtual contexts, remains under-researched. This PhD thesis examines how constraints in CSS can be designed to foster creative collaboration and contribute to a better understanding of how limited functionalities and interactions during particular phases of creative collaboration can help individuals and teams access a CSS's instrumental potential and benefit from idea generation and exploration beyond routine performance, and encourage more radical forms of creativity. To support the evolution of knowledge about the theory and practice of CSS design, this research project follows a design science research (DSR) approach.