information based ideation

We investigate tasks and activities in which people's goals are based in having new ideas. These range from planning an outing, a weekend, a vacation, or a hobby, to a paper, project, internship, thesis, career, or invention.

Information-based ideation tasks involve information seeking and exploratory search, which are characterized by learning and discovery, but more particularly focus the human desire to be creative. These are a type of divergent thinking tasks, which involve developing multiple answers to open-ended questions.

We develop and invoke mixed evaluation methods, connecting quantitative and qualitative data and analysis. Our quantitative work is based in ideation metrics, which are used to assess the creative products that people make using particular creativity support environments, while engaged in particular information-based ideation tasks. Our qualitative work is based in grounded theory, a processes of continuous comparison, in which participants' perspectives are iteratively elicited, characterized, categorized (coded), connected, and verified.

publications

Webb, A.M., Kerne, A. Integrating Implicit Structure Visualization with Authoring Promotes Ideation, Proc Joint ACM/IEEE Conf. on Digital Libraries (JCDL), June 13-17, 2011, Ottawa, Canada.

Kerne, A., Smith, S.M., Koh, E., Choi, H., Graeber, R., An Experimental Method for Measuring the Emergence of New Ideas in Information Discovery, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (IJHCI), 24 (5) July 2008, 460-477.

Kerne, A., Koh, E., Smith, S.M., Choi, H., Graeber, R., Webb., A., Promoting Emergence in Information Discovery by Representing Collections with Composition, Proc ACM Creativity & Cognition, Washington DC, June 2007, 117-126.

Koh, E., Kerne, A., I Keep Collecting: College Students Build and Utilize Collections in Spite of Breakdowns, Proc European Conf on Digital Libraries (ECDL), Sept 2006, Alicante, Spain.

Kerne, A., Smith, S.M., Choi, H., Graeber, R., Caruso, D., Evaluating Navigational Surrogate Formats with Divergent Browsing Tasks, Proc ACM CHI 2005.

Kerne, A., Smith, S.M., The Information Discovery Framework. Proc ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2004, 357-360.

Shah, J.J., Smith, S.M., Vargas-Hernandez, N., Gerkins, D.R., Wulan, M. (2003)
Empirical Studies of Design Ideation: Alignment of Design Experiments with Lab Experiments, Proc DETC 2003: ASME 2003 International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology

Shah, J.J., Smith, S.M., Vargas-Hernandez, N. (2002)
Metrics for Measuring Ideation Effectiveness, Design Studies, 24:2, 111-134.

Dodds, R. A., Ward, T.B., & Smith, S.M. (2003) Review of experimental literature on incubation in problem solving and creativity, in M. A. Runco (Ed.), Creativity research handbook, Vol. 3. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Ward, T.B., Smith, S.M., Finke, R.A. (1999) Creative Cognition, in Handbook of creativity, Sternberg, R.J., ed, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press.

Smith, S.M., Ward, T.B., Finke, R.A. (1995) Principles, Paradoxes, and Prospects for the Future of Creative Cognition, in Smith, S.M., Ward, T.B., Finke, R.A., The Creative Cognition Approach, Cambridge: MIT Press, 327-335.

Smith, S.M.(1994) Getting Into and Out of Mental Ruts: A theory of Fixation, Incubation, and Insight, in Sternberg, R.J., Davidson, J., The Nature of Insight, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 121-149.

Smith, S.M., Ward, T.B., Schumacher, J.S. (1993) Constraining effects of examples in a creative generation task, Memory & Cognition, 21, 837-845.

Smith, S.M., Blankenship, S.E. (1991) Incubation and the Persistence of Fixation in Problem Solving, Am Journ Psychology, 104, 61-87.

Jansson, D.G., Smith, S.M., (1991) Design Fixation, Design Studies, 12:1, 3-11.