ABSTRACT
The generation of novel ideas is an important and difficult part of the creative design process. Much of the research on idea generation (or ideation) has focused on formalizing techniques to support idea generation and characterizing the effectiveness of the techniques as measured by quantity, quality, and creativity of ideas. Less is known about idea generation “in the wild,” particularly idea generation across different timescales (i.e., idea generation across a multi-month project alongside idea generation in a period as small as minutes). We present a qualitative case study of a professional design team’s use of idea generation with analyses at four timescales. The “share back” that occurs during structured idea generation emerges as an interesting phenomenon, and we provide a detailed analysis of the work done by the team during the “share back” of ideas.
