Jin Gao

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Project 1: Impact Case ​

November 7, 2023

Draft impact case ​

The problem of creative stagnation is critical because it directly impacts the productivity and innovation capabilities of individuals and teams.

Our solution to address this problem is to design an intelligent, creative tool that can facilitate the collection and interlinking of ideas to ease the creation process.

We believe this is a good solution because it directly targets the user's pain point by filling the niche between professional creative software and basic notetaking apps. It addresses common barriers that hinder the creation process, such as fear of imperfection and time constraints.

We could measure the effectiveness of our solution by tracking user engagement metrics, the frequency of actively using the app, the length of each session, and the quality of their creative outputs. Also, we can provide entrance for direct feedback and surveys that can help the developer to investigate potential design flaws encountered directly by the users.

List of interview roles and potential interviewees ​

  1. Ringo Ye: MIT ACT Alumni, Artist and Entrepreneur
  2. Moge Yumeng Lu: Interactive Designer, heavy mindmap user, was invited to present at XMind, a popular mindmap software company
  3. Yuying Ye: Masters student, product management intern
  4. Brian Park: UX Designer
  5. Hermon Kaysha: Writer

Research findings ​

As alluded to, our team's primary focus is on addressing creative stagnation, with a specific emphasis on assisting individuals in organizing and interconnecting their ideas to enhance their creative thinking. To achieve this, we are developing journals-like creative tool that can automatically generate mind maps by interlinking the ideas in the journal. Our target audience is diverse, including writers, artists, or anyone seeking to streamline their idea organization for specific projects.

In our research efforts, we strived to pinpoint the factors that lead to or contribute to creative blocks and rigorously assess our proposed solution's effectiveness in addressing these causative factors. Furthermore, our research delved into exploring existing applications in the same domain to identify the shortcomings in their solutions and assess how our solution effectively bridges these gaps.

Findings ​

Problem severity

  • Researchers at the University of William and Mary found that creativity scores began to increasingly decline in 1990.
  • 48% of creatives claim their level of creativity to have declined in their industry in the last decade.

Causal factors

  • Fear of imperfection
  • Time shortage: 60 percent reports having great ideas but no time or support to realized them
  • And scientists blames the increased usage of electronic entertainment devices – Easter

Effectiveness Evaluation of the Proposed Solution ​

A study in the Creativity Research Journal found keeping an idea notebook to be one of four areas that enhance creativity. The other areas involved taking on challenge tasks, broadening one’s knowledge in unrelated fields, and surrounding oneself with interesting things and people. These four were evaluated on a group of employees and eight months later 55% of the group had increased their rate of new idea generation. These findings supports our hypothesis that providing people with journals could potentially help boost their creativity.

  • The solution addresses the time shortage barrier, which was identified as one the causal factor, by facilitating the organization of one’s idea in a much more efficient way.

  • It removes the blockage resulting from fear of imperfection barrier by giving the user a chance to just write down whatever comes to mind in their journal without attempting to find association of their thoughts directly.

  • It also takes advantage of the fact that people are more likely to have their electronic devices anyways to ensure that no idea is missed. Thus reversing the impact of the increased usage of electronic devices on creativity.

Existing Solutions and Their Limitations ​

  • SimpleMind & MindMeister & Scrapple & Coggle: all are mind mapping tools; some with an exception of allowing collaborative mind mapping

    Gap: all these solutions help users make mind maps, but they don’t get to the core of the problem which might be that the user has no time to think through the mind map or is struggling to find connections in his/her ideas. This is the gap we want to address so that the user can be given a suggested mapping that will hopefully make it much easier for them to make associations and organize their thoughts.

References: ​

VSD Analysis ​

Stakeholders ​

  • Direct Stakeholders: Our app is designed to cater to a wide range of users, including designers, writers, and entrepreneurs. Designers can utilize the app to gather reference materials and connect them to generate new designs. Writers can take notes on any ideas that come to mind and use them later for writing compelling content. Entrepreneurs can use the app to jot down business ideas and create mind maps when starting a new venture or launching a new product. Our interviews have revealed that different individuals employ various methods to foster creative ideas. Therefore, our app should support diverse note-taking and interconnecting approaches, making it suitable for different user groups.

Time ​

  • Adaptation: The main functionality of the app is to enable users to easily take simple notes and generate idea blocks whenever they come across good references or have good ideas, so that they can be utilized for mind mapping and brainstorming purposes. The way of how the app works would encourage users to develop a habit of capturing ideas and collecting references instead of relying on memory alone, which is a positive lifestyle change. To support this, the design could incorporate various features that make it easier for users to generate and stack their idea blocks. For example, allowing users to quickly add useful reference websites to the app by tapping the share button would streamline the process. Additionally, implementing multi-device sync would ensure that users can access their ideas and references anytime and anywhere.

Values ​

  • Value Tensions (Collaboration vs Privacy). One of the functionalities we are considering for the app is enabling users to share idea blocks. This feature would facilitate collaboration and creative connections when creating mind maps. However, it is important to address the potential privacy and security concerns that may arise from sharing all idea blocks and notes. To mitigate these tensions, the app can incorporate privacy settings that allow users to control the visibility and sharing of their idea blocks. Additionally, the app could provide transparency by allowing users to view how their ideas are being used by others, ensuring that their privacy and security are respected.

Interview plans and summaries of key lessons ​

Interview plans ​

Personal Background What motivates you to step into the art industry? How did you begin your career as an artist and entrepreneur?

Creative Process How do you usually find inspiration? What are your go-to techniques for generating new ideas? How do you capture and organize your thoughts during a brainstorming session? (write down notes? Draw sketches? Looking for online references?) In what ways do you seek out new experiences to fuel your inspiration? Do you prefer solo brainstorming or group brainstorming sessions? Why? How do you evaluate your idea?

Technology and Tools Do you use any apps or software for capturing and developing ideas? Are there any technological tools that have helped you break out of fixed thinking patterns? Could you provide one of your projects or others that may help demonstrate your desired creative software?

Challenges and Solutions How do you usually cope with creative blocks? Have you ever experienced a moment of inspiration drought? How did you overcome it? Business Perspective As an entrepreneur, how do you translate creativity into business value? How would you assess the market's receptiveness to new ideas?

Future Outlook What do you think is the most exciting trend in the creative industry? If you could offer one piece of advice to an artist experiencing a creative block or inspiration drought, what would it be?

Summary of key lessons/ gaps identified from interviews and research. ​

  1. Non-Linear Creative Paths:

    • Interviews revealed that creative professionals often follow non-linear paths to innovation. A non-obvious design opportunity is to map these paths and offer tools for individuals to explore creativity in a less structured manner.

  2. Cross-Pollination of Ideas:

    • The research and interviews shows that people often generate creative breakthroughs when exposed to ideas from unrelated fields. Encouraging cross-disciplinary inspiration and idea exchange could be a valuable feature.

  3. Collaborative Creativity:

    • Interviews revealed that creative individuals often find inspiration in collaborative settings. Designing a platform that facilitates remote, cross-disciplinary collaboration with opportunities for feedback within the team can be a unique opportunity.

  4. Emotionally Intelligent solution:

    • People may struggle with creative blocks due to emotional factors like self-doubt or fear of failure. Designing a solution that provides emotionally intelligent support or helps navigate away from such emotions could be a unique opportunity.

  5. Creative Routine Breakers:

    • Some individuals might rely on unconventional rituals or habits to overcome creative blocks. Identifying and cataloging these unique strategies can inspire the design of features that help others break out of stagnation.

  6. AI-Personalized solutions:

    • AI can be used to curate personalized creative solutions for individuals based on their interests, ideas, and past creative works. This tailored approach can help break through stagnation.

  7. Iterative design

    • Brian, an interviewee, highlighted the importance of iteration in his creative design process. However, he finds it challenging to effectively compare his iterative design samples using tools like Figma and Framer. Developing a tool that supports and enhances the iterative design approach could be valuable. This tool could provide features such as version control, design history tracking, and easy exploration of different design iterations, enabling designers to iterate, experiment, and compare more efficiently.

Revised impact case ​

The problem of creative stagnation is critical. Creativity is a valuable resource that directly impacts productivity and innovation capabilities. For the individual, creativity's decline stalls problem-solving and productivity[1][4][7], which may lead to depression and cease from progressing. For a team, a lack of creative solutions will hamper the overall momentum of industry advancements, lose the fierce commercial competition, and eventually lead to a profit decline.[2]

Our solution to this problem is to design an intelligent, text-based(for 1st version) idea-capturing and brainstorming helper app that can facilitate the collection of ideas and intelligently connect them to ease the creation process.[3] It features assisted creation function to allow users to easily identify connection within their ideas as well as collaborative function allowing users to collaborate and share ideas and insights.[2]

We believe this is a good solution because it directly targets the user's pain point by filling the niche between professional creative software and basic notetaking apps. It addresses common barriers that hinder the creation process, such as fear of imperfection and time constraints.[5][6] Our app directly addresses this by creating an intuitive interface that aligns with the user's natural thought processes. We emphasize efficiency, accessibility, and non-disruption to existing workflows that integrate seamlessly into the user's daily use cases.[2]

We could measure the effectiveness of our solution with a well-defined evaluation matrix derived from personas captured from interviews and VSD principles. We need to integrate qualitative and quantitative methods[2] to ensure that the app's effectiveness is not only measured in numbers but also in real-world creative achievements.

Quantitative measures include tracking the frequency and time of the user's activities, the length of each session, the number of the user's friends, and so on. Qualitative measures include assessment of the quality of users' creative outputs, comments, and contributions to the community. Apart from invited user tests, we can provide entrance into the app for direct feedback and surveys that can help the developer investigate potential design flaws encountered directly by the users.

Citation: [1]interview with Moge Lu [2]interview with Ringo Ye [3]VSD Analysis [4]interview with Brian [5]interview with Hermon [6]https://eliteauthors.com/blog/tackling-writers-block-strategies-overcoming-creative-stagnation/ [7]https://medium.com/writers-blokke/are-we-losing-our-creativity-1961975e1beb#:~:text=“A researcher at the University,Michael Easter on Medium recently

Team contract ​

Team Name: Cre8ors

Team Members:

  1. Jin Gao
  2. Sonia Uwase
  3. Kiwhan Song
  4. Esther Kinyanjui

I. Expected Level of Achievement and Effort

Each team member should outline their expectations regarding grades and the amount of time they plan to invest in the project. It's essential to ensure everyone is on the same page regarding their commitment to the project.

  • Grades Expectation:

    • Jin : above A-
    • Sonia Uwase: above A-
    • Kiwhan Song: above A-
    • Esther Kinyanjui: A-

  • Time Commitment:

    • Jin: 10hr/week
    • Sonia Uwase: 10hr/week
    • Kiwhan Song: 10hr/week
    • Esther Kinyanjui: 10hr/week

II. Personal Goals

Each team member should outline their personal goals for the project. This can include learning specific skills, achieving personal milestones, or creating a successful project.

  • Jin: create innovative creative tools that can trigger meaningful social impacts

  • Kiwhan Song: Collaborate effectively with team members to develop a useful app and write high-quality code

  • Sonia Uwase: Gain experience integrating diverse tech stacks in the development workflow, while also enhancing my teamwork and collaboration abilities.

  • Esther Kinyanjui: Explore new skill sets in a small, collaborative environment

III. Team Meetings

  • Frequency: We will hold team meetings weekly.
  • When: A day after the assignment is released.
  • Length: Each meeting will last approximately 1 hour maximum.
  • Location: Team meetings will be conducted in person.
  • What time: Thursday 5pm.

IV. Quality of Work

Describe how the team will maintain the quality of work. This may include code reviews, team review meetings, or pair programming.

  • Optional code review/ pair programming.
  • Unblocking each other when stuck.

V. Task Assignment and Deadlines

  • Tasks will be assigned based on self-proclaimed expertise and in fair quantity.
  • To avoid missing deadlines, we shall impose an internal deadline of 2 hrs before the actual deadline.
  • If deadlines are missed, the team will discuss amicably and communicate openly beforehand.

VI. Decision-Making and Conflict Resolution

  • Decision-Making: We will make decisions by consensus.
  • Conflict Resolution: In case of disagreements, we will hold a discussion within the team to find a resolution.

VII. Work Distribution

  • Work distribution should be balanced among team members throughout the project.
  • All team members are expected to participate in all stages and activities of the project.

Signatures/Initials:

Jin Gao [November 7, 2023]

Kiwhan Song [November 7, 2023]

Sonia Uwase [November 7, 2023]

Esther Kinyanjui [November 7, 2023]

This team contract is meant to promote transparency, collaboration, and a shared understanding of each team member's roles and responsibilities. Please review and sign to indicate your commitment to these agreements.

Citation:

  • Outline of team contract generated by GPT, filled by the team
  • Interview plan partially generated by GPT.

Appendix ​

Interview with Ringo Ye ​

Interview plan: ​

  • Introduction and Background:
    • Brief introduction inquiring about his recent achievements as an artist and entrepreneur.
    • Discussion on the inception of his career in both art and business.
  • Deep Dive into the Creative Process:
    • Exploration of sources of inspiration for idea generation.
    • Understanding his methods for capturing and organizing thoughts during brainstorming.
    • Identifying the type of environment that stimulates his creativity the most.
    • Talk about his strategies for overcoming creative blocks.
    • Preference between solo and group brainstorming sessions, and ask for differences.
    • Ask how to evaluate and make decisions after brainstorming.
  • Technology and Tools:
    • Ask about the usage of any specific apps or software in his creative process.
    • Request for an example project that showcases the creative software he values.
    • Ask about the app he uses the most, and what he thinks best relates to his ideal
  • Business Perspective:
    • Role of creative tools in the future endeavors of artists.
    • Ask about the potential social impact of this project
    • Insight into what he perceives as the most thrilling trend in the creative industry.
    • Strategies to ensure continuous innovation and uniqueness in his business endeavors.
  • Conclusion and Thank you

Key insights: ​

  • Identify target audience: think carefully about targeting business or individual customers; the design and commercial logic are very different.

  • Brainstorming for what: There are key differences between brainstorming in art and design. Art is proposing a question, design is solving the question.

  • Ringo’s product methodology: The way to design a good product

    • Develop empathy: conduct video interviews with people, ask what you need in their realm, and ask their pain points and questions.
    • Conduct qualitative tests that focus on the fundamental desire of the customers.
    • Develop insights: conduct quantitative tests on the massive amount of questionaries, asking the target customers’ pain points and what they care about. Find what is deep inside their subconscious. image.png

  • Define no more than three problems to solve.

  • Brainstorming needs flexibility and simplicity.

  • Different type of deliverables requires different inputs – also, flexibility is important.

  • The goal of your app design can be increasing the efficiency of the brainstorming process, improving the comments, feedback, like, questioning, reply functions, referencing, highlight, refer, and @people… Compared with traditional platforms, it organically organizes the functions to fit the user journey and action logic of the brainstorming.

  • General use cases are fundamental: for the peripheral group, there may be special use cases, but before that, make sure that the basic functions works the best.

  • Focus on one use case: design, music, writing, drawing…

  • Reduce the amount of information, excessive infos will interfere with the brainstorming process

  • The collaborative decision-making process is ****what ****brainstorming in business essentially is

    • The result of brainstorming is typically evaluated by the group leader, who has the right to choose. There may be voting functions.

  • Don’t make it like an OA software that has complex authentication mechanisms.

    • An example is Dianshi online render, which collaborates with Taichi Graphics. They sell rendering beans as a virtual currency to allow users to render with.

  • Consider the Business model:

    • To C: Freeware as a principle, and offer additional functionalities available for purchase; subscriptions…
    • To B: as a plugin for a big commercial software. It is not advisable to design an independent to B software without connection with other apps or platforms.

Interview with Moge Lu ​

Interview plan: ​

Alternative from Ringo’s interview plan:

  • Inquiring about the XMind presentation
  • Discussion on her social figure, what motivates her to create so much content in a long time span
  • Focus more on the usage of the Mindmap app

Summarization of key insights ​

  • Recording and finding information for later use is important.
  • Use templates to improve efficiency in the creative process. Create a sharable system to learn, borrow, and innovate by observing the work of others.
  • Organize your thoughts before writing so that you can better organize your time and energy.
  • The Card Method is a good approach to organizing and managing ideas.
  • Challenges in processing large amounts of information: It has the potential to use artificial intelligence technology to realize automatic label-generation functions.
  • Choosing the right fonts and colors to improve visual effects when writing.

Interview with Brian ​

Interview Plan ​

The goal of the interview is to find out:

  • How do UX designers generate creative designs?
  • What limitations do current design tools have in the creative design process? What tools do designers need to prevent and overcome creative stagnation?
  • How do designers define and evaluate the creativity of their designs?

Interview Summary ​

Facts ​

  • The entire process of Brian designing a new product is:
    • Collecting good designs to use as references
    • Extracting good design elements (such as colors, layout, interaction, etc.) from those designs.
    • Defining the main concept of his design + combining the good elements identified in the previous step.
    • Polishing the design to ensure consistency
  • Methods and sources he uses to design creatively and beautifully:
    • Dribbble: A good starting point for drawing the basic structure and layout (but not very creative, closer to standard ones)
    • Screenshots + Color Picker: Always taking screenshots and saving colors whenever he comes across a good design or color scheme
    • Collaborating with other designers: Instead of arguing about which design is better, he focuses on combining the strong points of each individual's design, often resulting in a good and creative outcome
  • Use of AI: Never uses AI when designing. Sometimes, he utilizes ChatGPT to generate standard descriptions and texts, but not for anything creative.

Key Lessons ​

  • Overcoming creative stagnation: When faced with creative stagnation, Brian starts with a design that he finds really cool and then deviates from it, adding his own styles and unique elements. This approach helps him break through creative blocks and generate fresh ideas.
  • Design reference management: Brian collects design references from various sources, but faces challenges in managing them due to their scattered nature across different platforms. Creating a tool or platform that helps designers organize and manage their design references in an organized and centralized manner could be an opportunity to address this issue.
  • Evaluating design novelty and creativity: Brian finds it difficult to evaluate if his designs are novel and creative enough, as he can become too accustomed to them. He emphasizes the value of getting other people's perspectives to assess the creativeness of his work. Developing a platform where designers can evaluate each other's work in terms of creativity could be a valuable opportunity.
  • Iterative design: Brian highlights the importance of iteration in his creative design process. However, he finds it challenging to effectively compare his iterative design samples using tools like Figma and Framer. Developing a tool that supports and enhances the iterative design approach could be valuable. This tool could provide features such as version control, design history tracking, and easy exploration of different design iterations, enabling designers to iterate, experiment, and compare more efficiently.

Interview with Hermon ​

Interview plan ​

The goal of the interview is to find out: ​

  • How do writers usually get started when face to face to a blank page
  • What helps them unblock themselves when feeling stuck.
  • If there is something that they did/do that was helpful in boosting their creativity/inspiration.
  • If they practice creative time blocking? If they do, is it helpful?

Summary of key lessons ​

  • For Creative writers:
    • When in front of a blank page, observe your surroundings and write anything and everything your observe or hearing until write how you are feeling and until you eventually catch your own thoughts
  • When feeling blocked:
    • Attempt to find inspiration from your blockage. Don’t run away from it. Think about it what’s causing it, and that in itself can bring up further inspiration
    • Question everything, even things you thought were unquestionable. Like what does it mean to even be blocked? Don’t think of any question as silly. However silly it might sound that could be your way out of the blockage
  • Every writer has a cause that made them start the writing, and it is listening to that cause that keeps one accountable. Not necessarily some form of creative timetable because otherwise one might fall in the mistake that they aren’t creative enough because they are not feeling inspired at their schedule creativity time where in reality, you can’t always be creating. There is a time to create and there is a time to observe and recharge.
  • Keep a book to write jot down ideas that come through
  • Sharing your writing is key to growth, especially if shared with people you care about. The affirmation can boost your confidence and thus, your creativity.