Ideation Project

Ideation Framework

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1. Context	While communication is important for ideation within knowledge groups, there are communication problems which diminish ideation. The dynamics of ideation is hard to be expressed by existing ICT, inhibiting knowledge groups to optimize ideation and attain collective intelligence.
2. Goal	The goal is to enable collective and efficient ideation among knowledge groups.
3. Success Criteria	The system is expressive to prompt and manage ideation.
4. Outputs	5. Process	6. Inputs
A framework (Ideation framework) consisting of A specification of Ideation Language for expressing rich information and executing functions. A specification of Ideation Notebook for individuals to gather information and manage knowledge. A specification of Ideation Channels for groups to communicate and manage ideation.	Standing in multiple streams of information, individuals observe, note, and organize information with Ideation Language in Ideation Notebook. Groups communicate and collaboratively organize ideas with Ideation Language in Ideation Channels. Groups turn organized ideas into actions and constantly manage them.	Group context Group commitment External source.
7. Boundary Conditions	The context of knowledge group enable them to have the potential of ideation. The commitment of the knowledge group is enough, maintaining system liveness. The external source is enough.

Introduction

This semester, we investigated the foundation of cognitive science and applied the discipline to the research of ideation process, which is an iterative cycle of gathering conscious into actions. In this paper, we address ideation challenges in existing communication system and proposed a framework to improve the status quo.

Ideation among Knowledge Groups

In this paper, we focus on knowledge group, where members are motivated to participate ideation. Ideation is the creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas, where an idea is understood as a basic element of thought that can be either visual, concrete, or abstract.[1] This kind of process is mainly conducted on information communication technology (ICT), where various communication functions(file transfer, annotaion, channel management, collaborative document editing) are aided by computer system. The automation speeds up communication and promotes ideation.

Ideation issues in existing ICTs

However, the crucial factors in ideation are not those basic functions, but the constant comprehension and awareness of the situation . In a conversation, individuals need to comprehend topic flow and group dynamics, express opinions and contribute positively to collective consciousness.

While existing communication platforms offer various tools, they remain poorly for helping people deliberate effectively, i.e. the systematic identification, evaluation, and convergence upon solutions to complex problems, leaving users prone to generate poorly-organized, unsystematic and highly redundant contributions of widely varying quality.

The communication channels mainly compose information chronologically, which cause several issues to arise:

• Scattered Content. The content in time-centric tools is typically widely scattered, so it’s hard to find all the contributions on a topic of interest. This also fosters unsystematic coverage, since users are often unable to quickly identify which areas are well-covered, and which need more attention.
• Low Signal-to-noise Ratio. The content captured by time-centric tools is notorious for being voluminous and highly repetitive. This is a self* reinforcing phenomenon: since it can be difficult to find out whether a point has already been made in a large existing corpus, it’s more likely that minor variants will be posted again and again by different people. Some authors may do so simply hoping to win arguments by sheer repetition. This low signal-to-noise ratio makes it difficult to uncover the novel contributions that inspire people to generate creative new ideas of their own.
• Balkanization. Users of time-centric systems often tend to self-assemble into groups that share the same opinions – there is remarkably little cross-referencing, for example, between liberal and conservative blogs and forums – so they tend to see only a subset of the issues, ideas, and arguments potentially relevant to a problem. This tends to lead people to take on more extreme, but not more broadly informed, versions of the opinions they already had.
• Dysfunctional Argumentation. Time-centric systems do not inherently encourage or enforce any standards concerning what constitutes valid argumentation, so postings are often bias- rather than evidence- or logic-based.

While there are collaborative documents for group information management , the following problems still exist:

• Semantic barrier: It is the misalignment of meaning when groups use language to communicate ideas. Due to the limited bandwidth of typing natural language in channels, groups can hardly express the complex ideas in their minds.
• High threshold for effective communication : Effective communication requires comprehension of the objectives and good communication techniques, which is not always attainable for groups without teachers or mediators.
• High threshold for managing ideation : The state-of-the-art methodology for ideation requires an experienced facilitator, which is not always attainable.

Ideation Framework

To tackle with these issue, we propose Ideation Framework, which aims to enable efficient and collective ideation among knowledge groups. It consists of the following parts :

• Ideation Language for expressing rich information and executing functions
• Ideation Notebook for individuals to gather information and manage knowledge
• Ideation Channel and Interactive Graph for groups to communicate and manage ideation

Standing in multiple streams of information, individuals observe, note, and organize information with Ideation Language in Ideation Notebook. Groups communicate rich information with Ideation Language in the channel and annotate, orgnaize information into ideas, intentions, goals, and projects , which prompt different intensity of actions. During the process, groups can interact with the Ideation Notebook, which shows the whole picture of the conversation and inspire themselves.

To test the validity of the framework, groups should be able to be inspired and express ideas efficiently in the communication system. There are two kinds of metric for this: the knowledge management process metrics and knowledge management output metric.

Further metric could be added into this framework, which represents different perspectives of ideation. The aformentioned metrics corresponds to the knowledge management perspective.

Input and Boundary Condition

Given the Ideation Framework, the process of ideation depends on the context of group, including roles and motivations, which affects the group's chemistry. Ideation also requires group commitment to serve as the system's fuel to maintain its liveliness. Finally, ideation needs external sources, such as knowledge, tools, social networks, to support the creation and innovation of a limited number of people.

Ideation Language

Linearity and sequentiality are integral elements in traditional writing. Ideas are expressed in a logical, linear fashion, and linear narrative forms govern most traditional writing. For interpersonal purposes (e.g. instant messaging, email, online discussion), it give rise to the issue of low precision and efficiency of expressing ideas. To reach an optimal condition, communicators are required to comprehend the objects in the conversation and convey them in an appropriate way, which sets them a high educational threshold. A possible way is to retrieve the information entities which fit the context so that given a series of obscure keywords, communicators are returned pieces of comprehensive information which is easily understandable. It is similar to having a domain expert and a communication expert beside to assist the communication process. More generally, a new kind of language, Ideation Language, is proposed in Ideation Framework.

The Ideation Language is based on hypertext, which is a kind of text not constrained to be linear and is specifically displayed on electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. The language combines both natural and formal language, oriented towards both human and computer understanding. It extends the potential of communication from writing to another level of manipulating data entities(e.g. retrieve, store, annotate, and relate pieces of information) and applying more functions in the ICT. Data is the atomic unit of a sentence. We propose 3 principles of data as the following, which also correlates with the structure of Category Theory :

1. The data can be constructed ontologically and connected as a graph
2. The connection between entities is viewed as one entity.
3. The connections are composable. The composed connections are viewed as one entity.

As the language is being typed into the system, a search is conducted to recommended potential operations as candidates, which are then recommended as candidates, just like the recommendation in existing Integration Development Environment(IDE).

Ideation Language changes the paradigm of communicating by plain text in ICT. Users are able to elaborate thoughts more precisely and quickly, utilize the underlying semantics of natural language, and overcome key issue of communication, like semantic barriers.

The criterias of Ideation Language are:

• Readability
• Reliability and Maintainability
• Simplicity
• Extensibility : there should be some general mechanism by which the user can add features to a language, defining new data types, creating libraries, adding functions to a library, adding keywords.
• Restrictability : possible for user to program usefully using minimal knowledge of the language and minimal knowledge of constructs
• Expressability : the language can express complex processes and structures with being concise.

Ideation Notebook

Note-taking is crucial when one comes across complex knowledge and emerging ideas. Facing multiple streams of data, a note-taker takes a perspective, observe and focus at the data, and come out with writable information. The information are written down along with the mindstream of the note-taker, and are then organized by note-taker with the aid of the notebook environment.

The digital notebook environment allows faster note-taking speed but limited expressibility of concept relations. A natural way of note-taking is to draw down concepts and relate them, which is flexible for quick organization and comprehension of fractions of knowledge. However, the process is inferior to typing when concepts are easily expressed by language. The dilemma give rise to mindmap tools, which enable note-takers to express concepts and the relations among them. Nonetheless, this kind of tools lacks expressibility for more general structure of knowledge, and even inhibits the thinking process.

This issue motivates us to propose Ideaiton Notebook, for enabling users describe data and execute knowledge management functions efficiently. The notebook enhances the cognition of users by providing interactions, which can be further configured efficiently to satisfy a wide range of knowledge development scene.

The criteria of Ideation Notebook are:

1. The users can express richer content, and develop more knowledge in less time.

2. The users gain insights, learn, and innovate during the interaction with Ideation Notebook.

The Ideation Notebook consists of portable information blocks and can be composed linearly or in a network form. The composed blocks are put in a page. The pages are not certainly nested. Instead, each page is an entrance of a search configuration. Therefore, users can retrieve any combination of information blocks and interact with them properly.

The value of the notebook to a user depends on user context, which offers motivation of knowledge development. It also depends on the user's understanding and proficiency to utilize the hybrid of natural language and formal language. Finally, the data streams surrounding users need to be rich and fluid, which leads to another proposal of Ideation Channels.

Ideation Channel

The communication channels are where ideation primarily takes place. However, the time-centic factor of most existing channels creates issues such as scattered content, low signal-to-noise-ratio, balkanization, dysfunctional argumentation, and so on.

It motivates our proposal of Ideation Channel, which enables groups communicate efficiently and bring about ideation. Groups communicate rich information with Ideation Language in the channel and annotate, orgnaize information into ideas, intentions, goals, and projects , which prompt different intensity of actions. During the process, groups can interact with the Ideation Notebook, which shows the whole picture of the conversation and inspire themselves.

With the assist of Ideation Channels, the communication of groups depends on the context of individuals, group and the objectives. The group needs to have a potential of ideation, such as having a good combination of expertise and cohesive motivation.

The Ideation Channel enables users communicate high-quality ideas by utilizing Ideation Language and Ideation Notebook. Users can reference any types of data in Ideation Notebook, which might have different interaction in the channel.

For example, a teacher can retrieve the information blocks tagged with question into the class channel. The question type is configured to have interaction with the role of students in the channel. So the answer of the question could be invisible to students until they make a reasonable guess. To further respond to a student's opinion, the teacher does not need to type in plain text and only needs to properly annotate his/her message (e.g. nice inference , needs elaboration , etc) and connect the message with existing informations.

In the example, the educational group can be guided to express versatile ideas every moment and integrate them to the shared knowledge base (namespace).

Discussion

From our investigation, most of the ICTs, team collaboration applications, and knowledge management tools, could not provide what Ideation Framework aims at. The process of manipulating data entities for either communication or note-taking purpose would remain inefficient without getting rid of linearity, which could be aided by the non-linear Ideation Language. Besides, group discussion is efficient only when members can easily comprehend situation and express themselves clearly, which could be obtained if the crucial information of discussion is expressed and displayed in the discussion scenario.

Conclusion

The Ideation Framework expresses a communication system to enable collective and efficient ideation among knowledge groups. The framework claims that the goal should be achieved by the following : ideas should be expressed by a non-linear language which utilizes data manipulation functions, the expressed ideas should be organized in digital notebook environment which provides interaction for user cognition, and the organized ideas should be communicated in a collective environment where participants can be aware of and optimize group conscious. In this paper, we elaborate why it is the case by addressing status quo, root causes, and corresponding solutions in each sections of Ideation Language, Ideation Notebook, and Ideation Channel. With this framework, different granularities of data(e.g. text, knowledge structure, group dynamics) could be expressed efficiently and appropriately. After the framework is realized into a system, its validity could be tested by measuring ideation process and ideation outcome.

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