Word count: 550
Summary of the Reading
This paper aims to create a system that will improve large-scale collaboration by making collaboration easier. These researchers aim to accomplish this by giving idea creators access to a new and better form of semantic modeling that would allow them to more easily see all of the ideas that have been created so far on a project. They want this new system to be nearly-real time and self-sustainable (they want to limit external labor).
The system has 3 main components: (1) it allows users to request to see the ideas of others from a global idea map, with some of the returned ideas will be very different from each other; (2) the user can request to see ideas similar to their own idea; and (3) the user can request to see a map of ideas, that shows how they relate to each other and how similar they are.
An evaluation was conducted and found that on average most people thought that the system was helpful.
Reflections and Connections
I find this idea to be very interesting because it seems like if it was done correctly, it would have many applications. I took an HCI class in undergrad which covered design (and ideation) and I always found ideation to be a hard process. The system proposed here could help with many parts of the ideation process. One of the hardest parts of ideation is keeping track of all the ideas. Sometimes, it can be overwhelming to try and organize all of the ideas that a group has come up with. When you get to a certain number of ideas, you just can’t cope with the sheer volume of information. It becomes extremely hard to organize the ideas in a coherent way and ideas you see one second can become lost in another. A system like this would make dealing with all these ideas much easier. Plus, with the weight of managing ideas lifted, the contributors would be free to come up with even more ideas.
I think that when it comes to ideaton, there really is no magic bullet solution. The fact is, ideation simply involves too much information. The human brain simply cannot deal with all of the information that comes with doing ideation. So, there is no perfect solution that will make ideation easy. This system does not eliminate all of the struggles of ideation. It is still hard to keep all the ideas you need in your head and it is still hard to deal with all the relevant information. But, this system does vastly improve on older, traditional methods, like sticky notes. This system makes it much easier to find ideas you are looking for and to manage all the ideas you’ve had. That is about as good as it gets when it comes to ideation.
Questions
- Could this system do anything else to help make ideation easier?
- What part of this system would you use most when you’re doing ideation?
- What makes it so hard to automate all or part of the ideation process? Can we ever achieve full automation of the whole process or even parts of it beyond what this system shows?
I believe a common mistake within ideation is recreating the wheel. Many solutions have already been created that can solely be iterated upon to achieve the result. These solutions may be lost since they are not properly indexed or they are archived and hard to find. This solution could include a similarity search using various web browsers to determine if there are any solutions similar that can be used. To this, I don’t believe the full automation of ideation can be achieved. The visualization techniques provided and searching techniques may be provided but introduce more barriers (time or accessibility) to fully represent the idea. Parts of the ideation like this attempt are steps in the right direction, however full integration with the web browsers would help resolve redundancy concerns.
To answer your third question, I agree with Myles, I don’t think that we can reach full automation when it comes to ideation. Creating an AI model that mines the internet for ideas won’t suggest new solutions. And I think that’s where it falls through.