MUSE: Designing an Inspiration Board

The Hogeschool Utrecht has been working on a room that aids users during a brainstorm session. This room is called ConceptSpace and harbors different New Media Tools (NMTs). This project is about the development of a NMT. By using computers NMTs are able to rapidly retrieve, store and review materials and media which are used and generated during a creative session. The purpose of this tool is to provide novice and expert users with inspirational material during a brainstorm session. When a closer look is taken at creativity in general and the creative process in specific, the idea generation phase is an interesting phase for this tool. A key aspect during this phase is association: hearing or seeing ideas from others can lead to new and innovative ideas. Providing the users with inspirational material is in service of the total session and it should not interfere with it. Speech recognition was researched as an input, but proved to be unsuitable for this tool. Instead of spoken out words as an input, the users will provide the tool with tagged photos. This is achieved by means of a sensitizing assignment. The results of this assignment are used twofold: the photos are projected on a wall and the tags are used to create an associative chain of images. The final prototype that was evaluated during the different evaluation setups is named MUSE. Due to its minimal but comprehensive interface users were not reserved in working with MUSE and as a result this NMT proved to be an added value during brainstorm sessions.