In this age of digitization, a new and challenging context arises for RE [ 1 ]. This argument is well in line with the special theme of this year's REFSQ conference, which claims that the next generation of digital systems will strongly a ect the daily and social life of a multitude of people as they will have to interact with these systems in many di erent ways. Hence, it is essential for the RE community to provide suitable skills, knowledge, methods, and techniques that enable gaining a deep understanding of the needs and fears as well as the social and living context of a diversity of stakeholders, who may even have a negative attitude towards digital solutions. This situation poses new challenges to RE, which make it necessary to re ect on and assess existing RE methods with regard to their suitability for this new and highly relevant context [ 1 ]. This re ection might ultimately require the improvement or development of new skills, knowledge, methods, and techniques supporting the elicitation, documentation, and analysis of stakeholder requirements [ 1 ].

Back in 2005, Susan Robertson already promoted the ideas that the eld of RE as a sociotechnical discipline can be improved by learning from other disciplines or professions, as these might have already solved problems and come up with techniques that we can reuse [ 2 ]. In her column, several authors reported on lessons learned from disciplines such as technical writing [ 3 ], family therapy [ 4 ], psychology [ 5 ], or medicine [ 6 ] within RE.

To the best of our knowledge, such published experiences on learning from other disciplines are sparse, despite the huge potential that best practices or techniques from other disciplines could o er to improve the eld of RE. This could be attributed to the fact that the identi cation of synergies between other disciplines and RE is challenging and di ers from our daily business, as it requires expertise and e ort to make the necessary abstractions.

To tackle this challenge, we consider creativity as a strong enabler for building a bridge between the di erent worlds, and hence we would like to share our experiences of applying the so-called \InspiRE-D" method, which supports systematic identi cation and elaboration of such synergies with the help of creativity techniques. We successfully applied the \InspiRE-D" method during the interactive breakout sessions in three editions of the D4RE workshop series [ 7 ], which we established in 2018 and which aims to answer the question \What can RE learn from other disciplines?".

In the remainder of this paper, we introduce the various creativity activities and corresponding templates of the \InspiRE-D" method in section 2 and discuss experiences and limitations in section 3. The paper concludes in section 4 with a summary as well as an outlook on future work.

Our work contributes to the goals of the CreaRE workshop by supporting the topic of creative use of techniques originally designed for other purposes that could be applied as techniques in RE. Moreover, we aim to motivate and enable both researchers and practitioners to take the rst step into di erent worlds and apply our method (or parts of it) in their particular work context in order to get inspired for RE by other Disciplines (\InspiRE-D") and ultimately incorporate best practices into RE techniques, which is surely a worthwhile endeavor [ 2 ]. 2

This section introduces the di erent activities of the current version of the \InspiRE-D" method that supports the identi cation and elaboration of synergies between RE and other disciplines. We applied and continuously improved this method in the aforementioned D4RE workshop series [ 7 ], which were all organized as full-day workshops. In each of these workshops, the rst part was dedicated to keynotes / inspirational talks as well as paper presentations in order to introduce the participants to the workshop goals and themes and to inspire them for the subsequent breakout sessions. In these breakout sessions, we organized the participants into groups of 4{6 people for collaborative discussion of the following leading questions:

Which best practices / techniques of other disciplines have synergy potential for RE-related activities and could be adapted in an RE technique?

As already mentioned above, we applied the \InspiRE-D" method during three editions of the D4RE workshop series that were collocated with RE'18 in Ban , Canada; with REFSQ'19 in Essen, Germany; and with RE'19 on Jeju Island, South Korea [ 7 ]. At the end of each workshop session, we asked the participants for their feedback and incorporated this feedback into the method. This especially applies to activity 3 (\Minimal Viable Version of RE Technique", see section 2.3), which had not been included in the rst edition of the workshop. The participants of this rst edition liked the story-boarding activity but missed having a list of concrete next steps at hand. Such an outcome would have motivated them to realize and apply the ideas they had elaborated in the workshop in their particular project contexts. In addition, they said that it would really be bene cial to elaborate the synergies collaboratively with experts from other domains. We were able to address this important issue in the second edition of the D4RE workshop series, where a former police o cer working as a RE consultant at that time gave the audience insights into the daily work of a police o cer, sharing his experience in applying techniques such as pro ling, crime scene investigation, and how to secure evidence. Moreover, he shared his view on how RE elicitation techniques such as interviews and workshops could bene t from (psychological) questioning techniques typically applied during interrogations. However, while it is the best case to work with experts right from the beginning, our experience has shown that it is also possible to elaborate great ideas for potential synergies even without the involvement of experts when applying the \InspiRE-D" method. Surely, the experts should then be involved at a later point in time when it comes to the realization and evaluation of the envisioned RE technique.

Basically, the four activities of the \InspiRE-D" method follow typical phases of a creativity process, like exploration, combination / transformation, convergence, and evaluation. That is, based on a given problem or goal, a creativity process typically starts with the collection of as many ideas as possible that address the given problem or goal in a brainstorming manner. In the \InspiRE-D" method, this exploration phase is supported by activity 1 \Idea Collection" (see section 2.1), which aims to identify as many ideas as possible with regard to the best practices of a given discipline with synergy potential for RE. In fact, this activity worked really well in the workshops and we collected many ideas within the given time frame of 45 minutes (ca. 20 ideas per group). Of course, not all of the brainstormed ideas might ultimately be suitable for an RE technique, but he core idea or a combination with other ideas might be.

Such a combination of ideas and their transformation into the RE context is the goal of activity 2 \Elaborating Synergies" (see Section 2.2), which therefore resembles the aforementioned combination / transformation phase of a creativity process aimed at further extending the body of possible solution ideas for the given problem or goal. The storyboarding technique was also found to be suitable for describing the envisioned method, as it focuses on the visualization of what the execution of the RE technique would look like.

The convergence phase of a creativity process is supported by activity 3 \Minimal Version of RE Technique" (see section 2.3). That is, the solution space is reduced to the most promising solution ideas that are realizable, which in our case corresponds to the proto-version of the envisioned RE technique. As already mentioned, this activity was an important addition to our initial version and helped the participants to identify concrete next steps.

Finally, the evaluation phase of a creativity process is supported by activity 4 \Wrap-up" (see section 2.4), which aims to evaluate selected ideas (in our case, the envisioned RE technique respectively its proto-version) in terms of their expected bene ts. Both the tweet template and the pro teer template helped the participants focus on the addressed challenges as well as the expected bene ts of the envisioned RE technique in order to promote the synergy potential.

Overall, the \InspiRE-D" method has proven to be suitable for elaborating initial ideas for synergies between other disciplines and RE, and we have been able to run the method in the given time frames of the interactive breakout sessions. We are aware of the fact that the outcome of this method are \only" visionary ideas for RE techniques that were initially sketched and not described in full detail yet, which can surely be considered a major limitation of the method. However, we still consider the visionary ideas as a rst important step towards overcoming the boundaries between the eld of RE and other domains and becoming aware of the potential that cross-disciplinary work could o er to our community. 4

To contribute to the goals and topics of the CreaRE workshop series, this paper introduced the \InspiRE-D" methodological approach that supports the systematic identi cation and elaboration of synergies between best practices from other disciplines and RE with the help of creativity techniques. We successfully applied the approach during the three editions of the D4RE workshop series [ 7 ] and continuously incorporated feedback given by the workshop participants. While the outcomes of this method are mainly visionary ideas, they serve as a valuable starting point for rst evaluation activities and the identi cation of promising future cross-disciplinary research and collaboration possibilities.

In the future, we aim to continue our D4RE workshop series and enrich our rst body of knowledge with regard to best practices / techniques from other disciplines and their synergy potential for RE. In these future editions, we will identify and apply further (creativity) techniques that have the potential to extend the \InspiRE-D" method (e.g., using vision videos [9] to elaborate synergies in Activity 2). Moreover, we aim to develop and publish a web-based tool solution that enables us to share our knowledge and experience gained in the D4RE workshops to a larger community. A rst tool concept has already been elaborated in [10], which is intended to primarily support the D4RE workshop organizers in documenting and publishing workshop results. Researchers and practitioners from various domains will be able to access and browse this knowledge to get inspiration for their own work.

Finally, we aim to apply and evaluate the idea of the envisioned RE technique that we used as an illustrating example in this paper. That is, inspired by the conspiracy walls typically used by detectives during crime investigations or pro ling, we are currently preparing and visualizing real project data on a board. We aim to use this board to foster discussion and analysis of requirements among the project team members in the near future in order to evaluate rst ideas regarding leading questions that might guide the discussions of the requirements from di erent perspectives as well as suitable visualization of requirements-related information on the board.