Creatively reusing (old) knowledge

People build new ideas on what they know and have seen. Sometimes this a good thing; sometimes it kills creativity. We want to know: are there scientific principles that can guide creators’ interactions with sources of inspiration so that they are inspired and not hindered in their creativity?

This is an old, fundamental question in the cognitive science of creativity (and has been the main thread of my research from the beginning of my research career), but it’s taken on a fresh significance in today’s information age, where creators can be exposed to many, many potential sources of inspiration online (e.g., Google Scholar, US Patent Database). The sheer number of potential inspirations is both exciting and daunting. Computational inspiration systems (such as search engines and recommender systems) can help by directing users’ attention to what is most inspirational. But what is most inspirational? (How) can we predict this beforehand?

What we’ve learned so far

Here are some things we’ve learned so far. For more details, please read the relevant papers!

• Building directly on diverse sources of inspiration doesn’t yield immediately creative ideas; these inspirations only turn into creative (i.e., both novel and useful) ideas when people spend time iterating on the resulting ideas (Chan & Schunn, 2015)
• Analogies from conceptually far domains can help people come up with new ideas (Chan et al., 2011; Chan & Schunn, 2015), but somewhat-far analogies strike the best balance between novelty and quality (Chan et al., 2015; Fu et al., 2013).
• When determining what is most inspirational, computational inspiration systems are more effective if they account for users’ cognitive states (e.g., whether they are “stuck” or “on a roll”) (Siangliulue et al., 2015), and ideally also account for how they have been thinking about the problem (Chan et al., 2017).

What’s next

Here are some questions we’re currently pondering:

• Are there (really) long-term, long-tail differences in the outcomes of far vs. near inspirations? In other words, are far inspirations less likely to be helpful on average, but far more likely to yield outsized breakthroughs when they are helpful? If so, what conditions/strategies, if any, increase the odds of these breakthroughs?
• How can we account for users’ cognitive states in a predictive (vs. reactive) manner? Could we create “thinking caps” that leverage real-time signals (e.g., physiological/brain signals, real-time NLP) to predict and (pre-emptively) respond to users’ cognitive states?
• Why do we fail to remember knowledge that we already possess that can help inspire creative new ideas? Can we leverage models of human memory to build information technologies that help us remember helpful things at the right moments?
• Empirical findings on the benefits of initial idea diversity are mixed. Can we create models that predict the problems and conditions under which diversity of initial ideas leads to better final solutions?

Related publications

1. Semantically Far Inspirations Considered Harmful?: Accounting for Cognitive States in Collaborative Ideation Chan, Joel, Siangliulue, Pao, Qori McDonald, Denisa, Liu, Ruixue, Moradinezhad, Reza, Aman, Safa, Solovey, Erin T., Gajos, Krzysztof Z., and Dow, Steven P. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition 2017 [Abstract] [PDF]

   Collaborative ideation systems can help people generate more creative ideas by exposing them to ideas different from their own. However, there are competing theoretical views on whether and when such exposure is helpful. Associationist theory suggests that exposing ideators to ideas that are semantically far from their own maximizes novel combinations of ideas. In contrast, SIAM theory cautions that systems should offer far ideas only when ideators reach an impasse (a cognitive state in which they have exhausted ideas within a particular category), and offer near ideas during productive ideation (a cognitive state in which they are actively exploring ideas within a category), which maximizes exploration within categories. Our research compares these theoretical recommendations. In an online experiment, 245 participants generated ideas for a themed wedding; we detected and validated participants’ cognitive states using a combination of behavioral and neuroimaging data. Receiving far ideas during productive ideation resulted in slower ideation and less within-category exploration, without significant benefits for novelty, compared to receiving no inspirations. Participants were also more likely to hit an impasse when receiving far ideas during productive ideation. These findings suggest that far inspirational ideas can harm creativity if received during productive ideation.

2. The impact of analogies on creative concept generation: Lessons from an in vivo study in engineering design Chan, Joel, and Schunn, Christian D. Cognitive Science 2015 [Abstract] [PDF]

   Research on innovation often highlights analogies from sources outside the current problem domain as a major source of novel concepts; however, the mechanisms underlying this relationship are not well understood. We analyzed the temporal interplay between far analogy use and creative concept generation in a professional design teams brainstorming conversations, investigating the hypothesis that far analogies lead directly to very novel concepts via large steps in conceptual spaces (jumps). Surprisingly, we found that concepts were more similar to their preceding concepts after far analogy use compared to baseline situations (i.e., without far analogy use). Yet, far analogies increased the teams concept generation rate compared to baseline conditions. Overall, these results challenge the view that far analogies primarily lead to novel concepts via jumps in conceptual spaces, and suggest alternative pathways from far analogies to novel concepts (e.g., iterative, deep exploration within a functional space).

3. Providing timely examples improves the quantity and quality of generated ideas Siangliulue, Pao, Chan, Joel, Gajos, Krzysztof, and Dow, Steven P. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition 2015 Best Contribution to Creative Communication (nominated) [Abstract] [PDF]

   Emerging online ideation platforms with thousands of example ideas provide an important resource for creative production. But how can ideators best use these examples to create new innovations? Recent work has suggested that not just the choice of examples, but also the timing of their delivery can impact creative outcomes. Building on existing cognitive theories of creative insight, we hypothesize that people are likely to benefit from examples when they run out of ideas. We explore two example delivery mechanisms that test this hypothesis: 1) a system that proactively provides examples when a user appears to have run out of ideas, and 2) a system that provides examples when a user explicitly requests them. Our online experiment (N=97) compared these two mecha- nisms against two baselines: providing no examples and au- tomatically showing examples at a regular interval. Participants who requested examples themselves generated ideas that were rated the most novel by external evaluators. Partic- ipants who received ideas automatically when they appeared to be stuck produced the most ideas. Importantly, participants who received examples at a regular interval generated fewer ideas than participants who received no examples, suggesting that mere access to examples is not sufficient for creative inspiration. These results emphasize the importance of the timing of example delivery. Insights from this study can in- form the design of collective ideation support systems that help people generate many high quality ideas.

4. Do The Best Design Ideas (Really) Come From Conceptually Distant Sources Of Inspiration? Chan, Joel, Dow, Steven P., and Schunn, Christian D. Design Studies 2015 Design Studies Award [Abstract] [PDF]

   Design ideas often come from sources of inspiration (e.g., analogous designs, prior experiences). In this paper, we test the popular but unevenly supported hypothesis that conceptually distant sources of inspiration provide the best insights for creative production. Through text analysis of hundreds of design concepts across a dozen different design challenges on a Web-based innovation platform that tracks connections to sources of inspiration, we find that citing sources is associated with greater creativity of ideas, but conceptually closer rather than farther sources appear more beneficial. This inverse relationship between conceptual distance and design creativity is robust across different design problems on the platform. In light of these findings, we revisit theories of design inspiration and creative cognition.

5. The importance of iteration in creative conceptual combination Chan, Joel, and Schunn, Christian D. Cognition 2015 [Abstract] [PDF]

   Theories of creative conceptual combination hypothesize that, to generate highly creative concepts, one should attempt to combine source concepts that are very different from each other. While lab studies show a robust link between far combinations and increased novelty of concepts, empirical evidence that far combinations lead to more creative concepts (i.e., both more novel and of higher quality) is mixed. Drawing on models of the creative process, we frame conceptual combination as a divergent process, and hypothesize that iteration is necessary to convert far combinations into creative concepts. We trace conceptual genealogies of many hundreds of concepts proposed for a dozen different problems on a large-scale Web-based innovation platform, and model the effects of combination distance on creative outcomes of concepts. The results are consistent with our predictions: (1) direct effects of far combinations have a mean zero effect, and (2) indirect effects of far combinations (i.e., building on concepts that themselves build on far combinations) have more consistently positive effects. This pattern of effects is robust across problems on the platform. These findings lend clarity to theories of creative conceptual combination, and highlight the importance of iteration for generating creative concepts.

6. The Meaning of Near and Far: The Impact of Structuring Design Databases and the Effect of Distance of Analogy on Design Output Fu, Katherine, Chan, Joel, Cagan, Jonathan, Kotovsky, Kenneth, Schunn, Christian, and Wood, Kristin Journal of Mechanical Design 2013 [Abstract] [PDF]

   This work lends insight into the meaning and impact of “near” and “far” analogies. A cognitive engineering design study is presented that examines the effect of the distance of analogical design stimuli on design solution generation, and places those findings in context of results from the literature. The work ultimately sheds new light on the impact of analogies in the design process and the significance of their distance from a design problem. In this work, the design repository from which analogical stimuli are chosen is the U.S. patent database, a natural choice, as it is one of the largest and easily accessed catalogued databases of inventions. The “near” and “far” analogical stimuli for this study were chosen based on a structure of patents, created using a combination of latent semantic analysis and a Bayesian based algorithm for discovering structural form, resulting in clusters of patents connected by their relative similarity. The findings of this engineering design study are juxtaposed with the findings of a previous study by the authors in design by analogy, which appear to be contradictory when viewed independently. However, by mapping the analogical stimuli used in the earlier work into similar structures along with the patents used in the current study, a relationship between all of the stimuli and their relative distance from the design problem is discovered. The results confirm that “near” and “far” are relative terms, and depend on the characteristics of the potential stimuli. Further, although the literature has shown that “far” analogical stimuli are more likely to lead to the generation of innovative solutions with novel characteristics, there is such a thing as too far. That is, if the stimuli are too distant, they then can become harmful to the design process. Importantly, as well, the data mapping approach to identify analogies works, and is able to impact the effectiveness of the design process. This work has implications not only in the area of finding inspirational designs to use for design by analogy processes in practice, but also for synthesis, or perhaps even unification, of future studies in the field of design by analogy.

7. On the benefits and pitfalls of analogies for innovative design: Ideation performance based on analogical distance, commonness, and modality of examples Chan, Joel, Fu, Katherine, Schunn, Christian. D., Cagan, Jonathan, Wood, Kristin L., and Kotovsky, Kenneth Journal of Mechanical Design 2011 [Abstract] [PDF]

   Drawing inspiration from examples by analogy can be a powerful tool for innovative design during conceptual ideation but also carries the risk of negative design outcomes (e.g., design fixation), depending on key properties of examples. Understanding these properties is critical for effectively harnessing the power of analogy. The current research explores how variations in analogical distance, commonness, and representa- tion modality influence the effects of examples on conceptual ideation. Senior-level engi- neering students generated solution concepts for an engineering design problem with or without provided examples drawn from the U.S. Patent database. Examples were crossed by analogical distance (near-field vs. far-field), commonness (more vs. less-common), and modality (picture vs. text). A control group that received no examples was included for comparison. Effects were examined on a mixture of ideation process and product var- iables. Our results show positive effects of far-field and less-common examples on novelty and variability in quality of solution concepts. These effects are not modulated by modal- ity. However, detailed analyses of process variables suggest divergent inspiration path- ways for far-field vs. less-common examples. Additionally, the combination of far-field, less-common examples resulted in more novel concepts than in the control group. These findings suggest guidelines for the effective design and implementation of design-by-anal- ogy methods, particularly a focus on far-field, less-common examples during the ideation process.

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