Arguably, information systems are least effective when supporting non-prescribed or unpredictable human activities. These can take place within or outside an organization. Particularly problematic are information systems support for the creativity of staff, and effective interaction with potential customers among the “general public”. This talk brings together two themes, i.e., creativity and individual differences, which are at the core of the above difficulties and explores a role for temporal data models in researching and addressing related problems. This discussion is illustrated with examples and results taken from the author’s diverse research, including studies into how the “general public” searches for information on the World Wide Web; museum knowledge repositories; and support for creativity in the arts. Issues highlighted are: tensions between software engineering norms and creativity; the negative effect of a mismatch between interfaces and cognitive styles; the need to consider not only the cognitive processes of users, but also meta-cognition; and the difficulty in modeling the time-related information using conventional temporal database solutions. The talk concludes by suggesting areas for further research.