Characteristics of interpersonal phonetic communication in resonance during co-creation

Abstract This study is aimed to understand the relationship between resonance and interpersonal phonetic communication during co-creation from the following points of view: linguistic functional factors and paralinguistic factors. The novice designers were assigned a concept generation task in pairs from the two nouns, “weather” and “stationery”. Linguistic function tags were contracted into five tag groups, Stuckness, Question, Seriousness, Proposition and Positiveness. The results suggest that phonetic communication in resonance showed significantly lower Stuckness and higher Positiveness towards the counterpart's utterances; Silence-based conversation was significantly observed when both were in creative states but had not reached resonance; Resonance was significantly more likely to occur with communication where one mainly spoke and the other also responded with utterances, neither one spoke in dominant amounts, or both spoke in equal amounts. This study will contribute to understanding and facilitating resonance, which is an essential phenomenon in individual/interpersonal/group creativity, with practical implications, especially for co-creative concept generation and sustainable creative flow in collaborative design.