Innovation without guidance is a hard task. To help the users, the authors proposed that a map of the solution space that is being explored can inspire and direct exploration. With research on current automated approaches, they found that all the approaches cannot build adequate maps. In addition to this, all the current deployed crowdsourcing approaches require external workers to do tedious semantic judgment tasks. To resolve this problem, they presented IdeaHound. The system can seamlessly integrate semantic tasks of organizing ideas into users’ idea generation activities. They used several case studies to prove that the system can yield high-quality maps without detracting from idea generation. And the users are found willing to use the system to simultaneously generate and organize ideas, and the system can obtain more accurate models than existing approaches.

Reflections:

The idea of the paper is really interesting. Instead of hiring crowd workers to do the idea clustering, they designed an interface that can let the users write their ideas and make the users able to group the ideas by themselves. Instead of letting a group of people write the ideas and hiring another group of people to cluster the ideas, making the first group of people able to do both idea generation and idea clustering is more efficient and more accurate. According to the idea groups, the system can generate a map with all ideas locates on it. If two groups of ideas have similarities, they will position nearby. With this map, the users can be inspired and provide more ideas. Additionally, if the users write some ideas, the system will automatically recommend some ideas which have similarity with them. This can also inspire users to come up with more novel ideas. I really like the example in the authors’ presentation. When not given an inspiring map or generate ideas automatically, we may get outputs like pizzas with top of broccoli, which is hardly accepted by most of the people. This makes me aware of the importance of the system.

I think this kind of interaction should be learned by all other current applications which deployed crowdsourcing. The users of the systems are willing to do some more tasks than required if they are interesting or they think the tasks are meaningful. Humans are not hired by AIs. Instead, AIs should be the helper of humans when humans are doing some tasks. As is said, we should leverage both human strength and machine strength. In this kind of idea generation task, it is more efficient to let machines support humans to complete the tasks.

Questions:

Will you do the ideas clustering automatically when you are only asked to provide ideas while you are able to do the clustering using the system?

Can this kind of idea, letting users able to do something instead of requiring them to do something, being applied to other applications?

Do you like pizzas with top of broccoli? What is your opinion on these ideas generated by systems? What about using a system to generate ideas and let human workers select the useful ones from all the ideas?

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Summary

Collaborative-creative online communities where users propose ideas and solutions to existing problems have shown that the suggestions can be simple, repetitive, and mundane. Thus, organizations view these platforms as marketing venues instead of innovation resources. Small groups and individual targeted creativity interventions demonstrated that they can improve the creativity outcomes. The authors propose a system that improves the quality of ideas proposed in large scale collaborative platforms. IdeaHound is an ideation system that integrates the task of defining semantic relationships among ideas into the primary task of idea generation. The proposed system creates a semantic model of the solution space by combining implicit human actions with machine learning. The system uses the semantic model to enable three main idea-enhancing interventions: sampling diverse examples, exploring similar ideas, and providing a visual overview of the emerging solution space. Users could use the system features to produce higher quality ideas. The authors conducted studies and experiments to show the effectiveness of the system and the need that this system fills. 

Reflection

This was an interesting paper to read. I have never used an ideation platform and have no background in this area but I learned a lot from this reading. To my understanding, the proposed system would be helpful in crowd lead communities that propose ideas for an issue or a problem. This system seems to be useful in keeping track of similar ideas semantically and grouping them for users when they type their own. This solution would drastically reduce repetitiveness and help users to build on top of others ideas. Also, allowing users to have a visual overview of the solution space is another tool that would help in brainstorming. I think that the visualization is helpful to identify different topics, least explored ideas, and most focused on ideas. Which could help redirect users in different directions based on the cluster visualization. 

I think that the interface when looking at the big picture is reasonable and very helpful. Yet when looking at the whiteboard and clusters of ideas up close, I feel like this could have been done better. Even though it is simple, using sticky notes as a resemblance of scrap notes, the page looks crowded and can be overwhelming for some users (at least me). I believe that there should be best practices for organizing ideas and maybe having a different interface would help making that process less messy and easier to understand.

 I am conflicted about the paper. I like the idea behind the system but the user interface is just too overwhelming for me. I do not know what would be the best visual item to replace the sticky notes or how that section of the system would be altered but maybe in a future version they would offer choices for different users (sticky notes and maybe a menu with toggle/sorting ability items?).

Discussion

• Do you agree with the user interface design for the user workspace? 
• How would you design this system’s user interface? 
• Have you ever been part of a crowd based ideation process? What were your thoughts about that experience? Would you use a system similar to the proposed system for your task?
• What would be a better way to deal with a massive amount of ideas than sticky notes?

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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

1. Could this system do anything else to help make ideation easier?
2. What part of this system would you use most when you’re doing ideation?
3. 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?

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Summary

Creating solutions for everyday problems requires out of the box solutions. For common problems that people have already worked through this is a problem since many common solutions or work arounds have already been created. Crowd sourcing these solutions are bound to run into redundancy issues if there is no arbiter to ensure there is forward momentum. To alleviate the need for such an arbiter while ensuring there are fresh ideas generated throughout the system, the team created a public sharing platform for sharing ideas. Utilizing the crowd platform, notepads (symbolizing new ideas or small excerpts) can be retrieved from others on the same platform through a similarity ranking. 

Reflection

 I can greatly appreciate the effort the team has gone to solve this problem. From working within a team of technologically advanced peers, I have been able to collaborate and learn greatly from each of the members. Unfortunately for many teams (teams cross-located across the globe or teams working remotely similar to the Corona Virus working from home order) the kind of general idea generation is greatly limited to the technology being used. Whiteboard technology like Draw.io and Microsoft Whiteboard is great but takes extra time to be adapted and written out. A design like this hosted by a company’s platform could provide greater collaboration across teams for potential side projects or to create a better future direction for the company. 

I do appreciate how simplistic and relatively familiar the design that the team made of the platform. Utilizing a similar design of sticky notes from Windows (at least version 7) is a great way to lower the “ramp up” or time of education the user has to take to learn the system. Despite this the team reported the workers needed to use a lot of mental effort to accomplish their tasks that were given to them. It is interesting to see not only with a common design there is always the “writers block” or the mental stopping point that is common throughout many people.

Questions

• Collaboration is a great way for ideas to be shared and improved. This is only increased when the participants have different experiences and backgrounds, helping to provide potentially new perspective onto the idea. What was your best idea collaboration you have had so far (can be from a professional environment or research environment)? 
• Unfortunately as described earlier there are a multitude of problems and issues that may arise when teams of people work or interact remotely. These problems are only further exemplified through the recent stay at home orders across the globe due to the Corona Virus typically only permitting essential workers. What types of issues (technological or not) have you experienced working with someone across technology? 
• Given how wide spread and with a potential spread of the Corona Virus this is predicted to last until at least August of 2020. With this it is likely people will still be hesitant to go directly back to work and even more so openly work together. Would you use this technology to help brainstorm with others in your field (or even in general)? 

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