ABSTRACT

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.

摘要

创造力对组织和企业的重要性现在被认为是设计和创新的先决条件。一种策略是引入新形式的信息系统，以支持员工的人类创造性思维。最成功的用途是在创意产业的专业学科，如设计和戏剧。本文报告了一个新信息系统的设计和评估，该系统旨在支持非创意行业中的人类创造力——制造工厂的健康与安全。新系统扩展了一个工厂中既定的风险检测和解决流程，以支持工厂员工创造性地思考健康和安全风险的解决方案。新系统在一家制造工厂使用了 3 个月多。结果表明，新系统生成的风险解决方案的子集比同期没有系统生成的风险解决方案更具创造性和完整性。然而，员工需要更多的时间来生成更完整的风险解决方案。评估结果导致了信息系统和与之相关的工作实践的协调变化。