Using Metrics of Curation to Evaluate Information-Based Ideation

Abstract

Evaluating creativity support environments is challenging. Some approaches address people's experiences of creativity. The present method measures creativity, across conditions, in the products that people make.This research introduces information-based ideation (IBI), a paradigm for investigating open-ended tasks and activities in which users develop new ideas. IBI tasks span imagining, planning, and reflecting on a weekend, vacation, outfit, makeover, paper, internship, thesis, design, campaign, crisis response, career, or invention. What products do people create through engagement in IBI? Curation of digital media incorporates conceptualization, finding and choosing information objects, annotation, and synthesis. Through engagement in IBI tasks, people create curation products. This article formulates a quantitative methodology for evaluating IBI support tools, building on prior creative cognition research in engineering design to derive a battery of ideation metrics of curation. Elemental ideation metrics evaluate creativity within curated found objects. Holistic ideation metrics evaluate how a curation puts elements together.IBI support environments are characterized by their underlying medium of curation. Curation media include lists, such as listicles, and grids, such as the boards of Pinterest.An in-depth case study investigates information composition, an art-based medium representing a curation as a freeform visual semantic connected whole. We raise two creative cognition challenges for IBI. One challenge is overcoming fixation-for instance, when a person gets stuck in a counterproductive mental set. The other challenge is to bridge information visualization's synthesis gap, by providing support for connecting findings. To address the challenges, we develop mixed-initiative information composition (MI 2 C), integrating human curation of information composition with automated agents of information retrieval and visualization.We hypothesize that MI 2 C generates provocative stimuli that help users overcome fixation to become more creative on IBI tasks. We hypothesize that MI 2 C's integration of curation and visualization bridges the synthesis gap to help users become more creative. To investigate these hypotheses, we apply ideation metrics of curation to interpret results from experiments with 44 and 49 participants.

A Modular Approach to Promote Creativity and Inspiration in Search

“…However, with the increasing predominance of search activities conducted in many contexts ranging from professional to everyday scenarios, recent research has begun to consider search and exploration as positive activities that can (and should) be pleasurable in order to promote creative discovery and sensemaking [12,51]. In fact, research suggests that search is closely related to creativity and ideation [28,29,24] where tactics are fluidly applied, combined, and adjusted in order to reach a certain goal [1,21,29].…”

“…Now, how does the deconstruction of search and knowledge about the composition of search processes that are driven by creativity, ideation, and learning inform the design of digital search interfaces? As discussed earlier, a number of valuable high-and lowlevel guidelines for designing digital search interfaces already exist [8,21,24,35,32,46,51,53,56]. We revisit and synthesize these with the modularity of search processes in mind.…”

“…Inspired by research on information-based ideation [24], we suggest providing visual previews of the thematic area behind a link to promote curiosity and foreshadow directions of potential exploration paths, which can further minimize the fear of getting lost in the collection. As Kerne et al suggest, the presentation of rich (visual) links within and across collections can also help to provide stimuli to overcome fixation or getting stuck [24].…”

“…Curated sub-collections can provide starting points for less directed, experience-oriented explorations or for searches with hard-to-define criteria (e.g., a particular reading experience). The support of knowledge sharing has been recommended in the context of collaboration and creativity [46,53]; the curation of content can be considered as beneficial for creative ideation [30,24,38]. Integrating such features from digital creative communities 1 where people make collections of hand-picked items available for others to browse into search interfaces can help to support the creative aspects and outcomes of search.…”

“…body of literature has investigated information behaviour in professional [1,2,3,6,14,31,32] and leisure contexts [10,18,30,42]. Research has also considered search as part of creative processes [24,32,46] as well as a creative process in itself [28,29]. Furthermore, exploratory search [35,53] and search for pleasure (e.g., [22]) have been discussed, alongside design considerations for versatile interfaces that go beyond targeted search [21,46,32,51,53,56].…”