Everyday ideation

Abstract

We develop new understanding of how people engage in digital curation. We interview twenty users of Pinterest, a social curation platform. We find that through collecting, organizing, and sharing image bookmarks, users engage in processes of everyday ideation. That is, they use digital found objects as creative resources to develop ideas for shaping their lives. Curators assemble information into new contexts, forming and sharing ideas with practical and emotional value. We investigate cognitive and social aspects of creativity that affect the digital curation practices of everyday ideation. We derive implications for the design of curation environments that support information-based ideation.

Balancing the Fluency-Consistency Tradeoff in Collaborative Information Search with a Recommender Approach

“…Networked search (e.g., Lazer & Bernstein, 2012), however, benefits from balancing individual exploration -a process that benefits from ideational fluency (e.g., Kerne et al, 2014) -and exploitation of each other's search results, which, in the context of tag-based bookmark sharing, is facilitated by topically consistent tag choices (Dellschaft & Staab, 2012). Therefore, finding evidence of the fluency-consistency tradeoff begs the question of how we are to deal with the downside of a flat associative hierarchy, i.e., growing inconsistency.…”

“…An effective recommendation mechanism for collaborative information search Tag recommendation mechanisms (TRM) can be seen as nonhuman actors (Webster, Gibbins, Halford, & Hracs, 2016) to which developers of social information systems delegate the intention of making information search more effective. TRM can be directed either toward convergence (i.e., tagging consistency) for the sake of aligning the vocabulary (e.g., Font et al, 2015), or divergence (i.e., ideational fluency) for stimulating creative ideation (e.g., Kerne et al, 2014). For system designers, this means it is difficult to achieve both things at the same time.…”

“…Digital curation, i.e., collaborating on the search and organization of problemrelated sources (e.g., articles, videos, etc.) in social Web environments (e.g., Kerne, Smith, Koh, Choi, & Graeber, 2008;Kerne et al, 2014;Linder, Snodgrass, & Kerne, 2014), can be key in networked search. By raising one's awareness of others' contributions (e.g., collected sources) and reflections upon them (e.g., annotations), digital curation helps to mutually stimulate ideas "to increase one's potential for realizing creativity" (Linder et al, 2014(Linder et al, , p. 2411.…”

“…in social Web environments (e.g., Kerne, Smith, Koh, Choi, & Graeber, 2008;Kerne et al, 2014;Linder, Snodgrass, & Kerne, 2014), can be key in networked search. By raising one's awareness of others' contributions (e.g., collected sources) and reflections upon them (e.g., annotations), digital curation helps to mutually stimulate ideas "to increase one's potential for realizing creativity" (Linder et al, 2014(Linder et al, , p. 2411. In the sense of Sarmiento and Stahl (2008), digital curation supports the social dimension of creativity because it facilitates the building and maintenance of a shared problem space (e.g., of emerging relations between Web resources mediated by annotations) and bridging across different individuals' complementary ideas.…”

“…In the present article, we draw our attention to the divergent pole of the exploration-exploitation continuum by considering effects of networked search on ideational fluency, a concept from the creative cognition literature (e.g., Benedek & Neubauer, 2013). In the present context, it describes how easily and continuously diverse ideas can be accessed from memory during information-based ideation (Kerne et al, 2008(Kerne et al, , 2014, i.e., when thinking about search topics to be explored in future queries. Referring to previous work on cognitive effects of social tags on mental structures (e.g., categories and associations; e.g., Fu & Dong, 2012;Seitlinger & Ley, 2012;Seitlinger, Ley, & Albert, 2015), we anticipate a tradeoff between fluency and consistency: when users of a digital curation environment perceive others' tags, these tags leave episodic memory traces (Seitlinger & Ley, 2012;Seitlinger et al, 2015), strengthening previously weak associations to a search topic, in case these traces represent new ideas.…”