Managing Ideas in Creative Work examines the role and nature of tools that designers use to capture, manage, and develop ideas. The project employs a humanistic IT research approach to develop a conceptual framework for understanding how tools, for better or worse, influence how we manage and work with ideas in practice, specifically in the domain of design. To develop the framework, we integrate ‘in the wild’ studies of idea repositories and idea management in leading design organizations with theoretical contributions from Creativity Research, Human- Computer Interaction, and Design Research.
The project demonstrates how a humanistic perspective can address a fundamental problem in how we conceive of, use, and develop IT today, namely the discrepancy between the principles upon which current tools are built, emphasizing functional aspects such as efficiency and precision, versus core dynamics that drive creative processes, such as exploration and experimentation.
