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routines and ways of problem solving than novices, which thus may lead to fixation on more
established ways of doing things. In addition, proponents of the view that an individual's
level of creativity is an individual trait may argue that any increase in creativity possible from
mere provision of a richer level of domain knowledge will be constrained by the individual's
intrinsic level of creative ability. Individuals may also need a requisite level of motivation and
degree of reflection to integrate new information successfully and overcome the cognitive
load (mental demands) required to integrate and preprocess the incoming information in order
to be able to leverage this information within a demanding creative task. Overall, the
relationship between one's knowledge and level of creativity may be mitigated by a number
of factors (e.g., personal level of creativity). Thus, one cannot merely assume that availability
of a richer information set (and hence, greater available domain knowledge) will necessarily
lead to the level of mental connections and permutations of cognitive structures required to
produce creative insights.
INDIVIDUAL BRAINSTORMING FOR
REQUIREMENTS DETERMINATION
Aurum et al. (2002) (see, also, Aurum & Martin, 1999, for related findings) reported
results of a study investigating whether application of the SBS protocol would deliver a richer
set of requirement statements and insights.
Experimental Task
An experiment was conducted in which participants were told to assume the role of a
systems analyst (SA), who had been retained by a fictitious organization to write a
requirements specification for their main information systems. The fictitious organization was
the Cultural Heritage Authority (CHA), with a corporate charter that was to coordinate the
marketing of Australia's cultural heritage.
In developing their requirements specification, each participant was required to utilize
the software developed for the experiment, which was specifically designed to support
application of the SBS protocol. This tool allowed subjects free access to the document set.
The type of documents within the document set included fictitious interviews with users and
other people holding authoritative positions within CHA and the wider industry and
abstracts from published articles addressing heritage or marketing issues. In developing the
tool, particular attention was paid to designing the interface. It was important to prevent
substantial cognitive resources from being diverted from the task in response to demands
from the user-interface. The aim was to produce an interface that would have minimal impact
on cognitive load: one that could be learned easily by a novice user and yet was comprehen-
sive enough to satisfy the experienced user.
Subjects and Procedure
A total of 16 subjects participated in the study on a voluntary basis. The participants
were drawn from a pool of graduate students enrolled in a System Analysis and Design course
at a large Australian university. Each received a monetary incentive of $45 for their
participation. The experimental session was conducted in a microcomputer laboratory. On
arrival, subjects were seated at individual workstations and worked alone. They received
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