The term 'group creativity' can be attributed to numerous and diverse situations in which a group of people communicate and/or work together. In recent years there has been an increasing focus on looking at creativity within a social context as the development of ideas and innovation often require some form of group interaction during the process of work.

My research involves creating a structured understanding of the process of joint music composition, which is an instance of group creativity. Joint music composition defines a new direction to approaching group creativity research because it is product creativity that develops over time but in a group context.

Currently there are no analytical frameworks or tools designed specifically for the investigation of the processes involved in this domain. This is a particularly difficult area to study as the role of the participants, the processes and artefacts are unspecified or under-defined. Up to now we have successfully employed distributed cognitive principles in creating a structured understanding of the process of work. Our findings help support the idea that new types of representations (i.e., computer mediated representations) may have positive impacts at certain stages of composition and hence group creativity.

In order to verify and extend my findings, I will conduct experiments that look at the impacts of using a computer prototype in joint music composition.

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