Context

This work is situated in the context of electronic brainstorming and mobile ideation. Usually, brainstorming sessions take place offline and in a fixed space. This work instead focuses on electronic brainstorming using a mobile application to investigate how uncoupling brainstorming from the dimensions of time and space influences the brainstorming process of a group of people.

Problem

The motivation for the work is that brainstorming in a fixed space and timeframe has some disadvantages:

1. There is no room for incubation (see [1])
2. The context is the same (see [2])
3. You have to block longer periods, find a date, etc (see [3])

To the best of our knowledge, nobody has researched how it works if instead of a 20-minute brainstorming session you give people a mobile app to enter ideas and let them brainstorm over some time (e.g. one week). A potential problem might be that if you just give people an app, they won't enter any ideas at all, or they forget that they should. That's why we have been thinking about adding push notifications/regular reminders. Research in the field of fitness apps (e.g. [4]) addresses similar problems.

Objectives of this thesis

The goal of this thesis is to create a basic app, that can be used in studies to investigate mobile ideation. The features of the app should be oriented toward [4].

The focus should be on the implementation, the testing of the app should be purely explorative to uncover possibly interesting questions.

Possible procedure

• Literature Review electronic brainstorming and mobile ideation.
• Design and implementation of a mobile application using a human-centered design process, that serves as a basis for further research in the area of mobile ideation.
• Explorative usability testing.

References

• [1] Ritter, S. M., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2014). Creativity—the unconscious foundations of the incubation period. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 215.
• [2] Teevan, J., & Yu, L. (2017, June). Bringing the wisdom of the crowd to an individual by having the individual assume different roles. In __Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition__ (pp. 131-135).
• [3] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/microtasks-and-microproductivity/
• [4] Zhou, M., Mintz, Y., Fukuoka, Y., Goldberg, K., Flowers, E., Kaminsky, P., ... & Aswani, A. (2018, March). Personalizing mobile fitness apps using reinforcement learning. In CEUR workshop proceedings (Vol. 2068). NIH Public Access.
• [5] Mahyar, N., James, M. R., Ng, M. M., Wu, R. A., & Dow, S. P. (2018, April). CommunityCrit: Inviting the public to improve and evaluate urban design ideas through micro-activities. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-14).