Digital facilitation assistance for collaborative, creative design processes

Abstract

People focus more and more on creating innovations collaboratively. Digital assistants (DAs) can accelerate such collaborative, creative design processes by supporting people in their work. Especially in the context of design, such as design thinking, moderators that facilitate collaborative, creative workshops can benefit from the support for their teams and themselves in the form of a DA. Based on interviews with experienced workshop facilitators from research and practice, we discuss implications for the design and usage of DAs in collaborative, creative design processes. We identify 16 distinct capabilities of DAs for task, process and interaction facilitation to guide design research and practitioners' endeavors toward helpful automated DT facilitation support. Moreover, we outline a research agenda to foster future research on this young research area.