Context

Leveraging the crowd for idea generation has attracted a lot of attention recently, especially with the emergence of ideation platforms such as Quirky (www.quirky.com) and OpenIDEO (www.openideo.com). These platforms introduced new challenges, for example, many ideas generated by the crowd are mundane and repetitive. It is economically unfeasible to filter out low quality ideas manually due to the high volume of ideas. Therefore, improving the creativity of ideas provided for these platforms has become a focus of research in recent years.

Problem

Ideators possibly find it helpful, to gather information about the problem they're trying to solve while brainstorming.

It can help them contextualize it better and find useful parts of their memory to activate in their search for new ideas (1).

To realize this concept it is required to find a way to connect the problem to useful information, by analyzing the problem statement using NLP and gathering appropriate information from a knowledge base (e.g. Wikipedia).

Objectives

A web-based software, that shows informative text snippets during brainstorming

Procedure

• Literature Review on NLP, Information gathering, HCI ...
• Build a software, that finds snippets from Wikipedia article based on an input text
• Create a web-based UI, that uses informative text snippets during brainstorming
• Evaluate the tool in a qualitative user study

References

[1] VanGundy, A. B. (2008). 101 activities for teaching creativity and problem solving. John Wiley & Sons.