InspirationWall: Supporting idea generation through automatic information exploration

Collaborative idea generation leverages social interactions and knowledge sharing to spark diverse associations and produce creative ideas. Information exploration systems expand the current context by suggesting novel but related concepts. In this paper we introduce InspirationWall, an unobtrusive display that leverages speech recognition and information exploration to enhance an ongoing idea generation session with automatically retrieved concepts that relate to the conversation. We evaluated the system in six idea generation sessions of 20 minutes with small groups of two people. Preliminary results suggest that InspirationWall contrasts the decay of idea productivity over time and can thus represent an effective way to enhance idea generation activities.