Using data to stimulate creative thinking in the design of new products and services

Exploring interactive visualizations of data generated within the domain for which new products and services are to be designed can play a useful role in stimulating ideas that are considered highly appropriate to that domain. We describe a study in which participants in four collaborative design workshops used information visualizations representing electricity consumption data to help generate ideas for new products and services that could utilise the data generated by a smart home. Participants in the workshops appeared to use sensemaking behaviour to develop insights about the domain, which were later used in generating new ideas. Ideas arising from workshops where the stimulus was data visualized with less ambiguity in the visual encoding were judged to be significantly more appropriate than those from workshops where ambiguity in the visual encoding of the data used as stimulus was intentionally increased. We discuss the implications of this with regards to designing future workshop activities.