Design of Creativity Support Tools

Support seeking inspiration

Our participants reported looking for finished examples to seek inspiration in their projects. Although the finished examples can be articles, images, or videos, images were the primary resource that participants used to search for examples. Search engines do a good job of helping people find a variety of images, but there is still room for improvement. For instance, it is still challenging for people to quickly narrow down the scope of the images that they want to search for. Besides, our participants noted that when they wanted to search for images that were related to design work and arts, search engines might not provide many high-quality results.

Another challenge related to image search is tracking and saving images that have been already viewed. Different from reading articles, browsing images could be very quick and people can browse many images in a short period. When using search engines to browse images, people may just look at them without clicking them. That is to say; many viewed images might not be logged in the browser history. For example, P6 noted that she had to download images and save them in her desktop so that she could go back to review them later:

“I find it so important to save the images since by scanning them a few days later they evoke different thoughts than the first time, so I save images I like to a file. I probably have 20 images now for this project” [P6-diary]

It may help streamline people’s creative processes if search engines can be designed to help people save and organize and review the images that they browsed.

Support seeking indirect feedback

In the field of creativity support tools, several novel systems were developed for providing users a platform to seek direct feedback from experts (Y. W. Wu & Bailey, 2017; Yen et al., 2017; Xu et al., 2014) to evaluate their ideas. In our research, we found that participants primarily used

two ways to get feedback regarding their work. To getdirect feedback, participants mainly used Facebook or social media apps to ask their friends, family, and colleagues to provide comments or suggestions on their ideas and work. As to indirect feedback, participants searched for the tips/opinions/recommendations that can be analogous to participants’ work or ideas and used them to help with evaluating ideas. opinions To the best of our knowledge, in the fields of information search and retrieval, few efforts have been made to understand how to support people find useful tips and opinions. To achieve the goal, search systems need to learn how to do analogy mining and provide “analogical results” (not just relevant) to people. For instance, in the area of HCI, some related work has been done to explore ways to design and implement models that can support people to find useful analogies in large datasets (Kittur et al., 2019; Chan, Chang, Hope, Shahaf, & Kittur, 2018; Gilon et al., 2018; Hope, Chan, Kittur, & Shahaf, 2017; Yu, Kraut, & Kittur, 2016).

Support information use

Information searching is an important component of people’s creative projects. Across different creative stages, our participants had different information needs and searched for different resources to help their project move forward. However, only searching for information would not help their projects to get done. Our participants also had to make use of the information found online to “create something”. Prior work has considered dimensions of information usage. For example, in Belkin’s ASK (Belkin, 1980) and Dervin’s sense-making model (Dervin, 1998), new ideas can be a possible outcome of information use. Understanding information use in the context of ideation has also been explored by Makri et al. (Makri et al., 2019). In our diary and interview data, we identified several common approaches that participants used tosave, organize, and preserve the information for the use in the future (see Figure 6.1).

It should be pointed out that notes-taking played an important role in our participants’ projects. Our participants described taking digital notes, paper notes, or both to help themselves save and use the information that they encountered:

“I took down a few notes within Microsoft word that stood out to while watching the video as well as some other project ideas ... ” [P5-diary]

Figure 6.1: Ways to save, organize, and preserve information for the use in future: approaches were identified from participants’ diary data

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use at a later date. For instance, I saved the link to [name of site] so I can explore their maps and data later.” [P10-diary]

“That’s really just my way of being able to access that information no matter what device I’m using. So let’s say I don’t have my computer with me, but I have my iPad reader and I’m wanting to just read and take notes on the Notes app. I can have both those apps open at the same time and take handwritten notes.” [P2-interview]

This finding also suggests that supporting note-taking during searching is necessary, and just as P6 wrote down in her diary:

“I wish there was a tool that would annotate on the actual web pages and take a screenshot and save in OneNote. I could probably figure out how to do that if I tried, but to me I want to work on the art not figuring out new tech. I scribbled down gesso and joint knife so that I wouldn’t forget to buy them tomorrow.” [P6-diary]