Research ideas are pivotal in research practice. While research domains, topics, and methods are often outlined by specific research fields, the process of capturing and developing research ideas is less categorical. Conceiving and developing research ideas requires continuous creative thinking, usually supported by various different tools, each more or less carefully selected by a researcher to fulfill a specific purpose. In this paper, we investigate the creative work practices of academic researchers, with a focus on the workflows and tools they employ to manage ideas. Through a qualitative survey (n=51) and in-depth interviews (n=18) with researchers from a wide range of fields, we identify and describe typical processes of managing research ideas, different types of research ideas (a research question or problem, a method, a hypothesis or antithesis, and a theory), properties of good research ideas, as well as potentials for tools and technology to support idea management for researchers.

Digital tools that support creative activities are ubiquitous in the design industry, yet practitioners appear to prefer pen and paper for design ideation. To better understand this exception, we conducted a comparative study between analog and digital tools and their impact on the divergent and convergent thinking patterns of groups of designers. We analysed how 24 participants solved comparable design ideation tasks in two conditions using linkographic protocol analysis – a notation method that focuses on identifying and linking small steps in the design process called moves. Our findings suggest that digital ideation tools yield more convergent thinking compared to analog tools, with no discernible impact on general productivity or divergent thinking.

This work explores the publicly available annual Design Tools Survey from 2017 to 2020 to find that brainstorming and ideation consistently appear to be the only activity where professional designers make elaborate use of analog tools, like pens, paper, and whiteboards. Furthermore, this predisposition for the analog appears to be reliable for both freelancers designers to larger design teams, as well as novice to very seasoned designers. These findings are discussed in relation to collaborative design work and the interactive qualities of the tools.

Understanding users is central to design and Human-Computer Interaction, both for researchers and for practitioners, who often conduct user research and communicate its value to stakeholders and clients. Despite its praised relevance, we know little about how user research affects design creativity. Our objective is to establish a foundation for answering this question. We first review empirical findings from related domains and examine how the value of user research is linked to design creativity. We then present a pilot study for a large-scale experimental setup to determine how different levels of user research influence design creativity. Finally, we discern preliminary insights on the relationship and provides recommendations for how future studies may investigate the critical and complex relationship between user research and design creativity.

The design and development of Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) is of growing interest in research at the intersection of creativity and Human-Computer Interaction, and has been identified as a 'grand challenge for HCI'. While creativity research and HCI each have had long-standing discussions about---and rich toolboxes of---evaluation methodologies, the nascent field of CST evaluation has so far received little attention. We contribute a survey of 113 research papers that present and evaluate CSTs, and we offer recommendations for future CST evaluation. We center our discussion around six major points that researchers might consider: 1) Clearly define the goal of the CST; 2) link to theory to further understanding of usage of CSTs; 3) recruit domain experts, if applicable and feasible; 4) consider longitudinal, in-situ studies; 5) distinguish and decide whether to evaluate usability or creativity; and 6) as a community, help develop a toolbox for CST evaluation.

On the basis of a qualitative study of five domains of creative work, this paper analyzes two recurring strategies in the use of digital tools, 'margins' and 'view-shifts'. These strategies are commonly employed by creative professionals across five different domains. Based on video from observational studies of music producers, video production, industrial design, graphic design, and service design, we conduct a thematic analysis to arrive at the two strategies. We furthermore examine the two strategies in relation to existing research into creativity and cognition, and discuss how this can inform future studies of the use of digital tools in creative work.

Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) play a fundamental role in the study of creativity in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Even so, there is no consensus definition of the term 'CST' in HCI, and in most studies, CSTs have been construed as one-off exploratory prototypes, typically built by the researchers themselves. This makes it difficult to clearly demarcate CST research, but also to compare findings across studies, which impedes advancement in digital creativity as a growing field of research. Based on a literature review of 143 papers from the ACM Digital Library (1999-2018), we contribute a first overview of the key characteristics of CSTs developed by the HCI community. Moreover, we propose a tentative definition of a CST to help strengthen knowledge sharing across CST studies. We end by discussing our study's implications for future HCI research on CSTs and digital creativity.

Creativity has been a growing topic in the ACM community since the 1990s; however, no clear overview of this trend has been offered. We present a thorough survey of 998 creativity-related publications in the ACM Digital Library collected using keyword search to determine prevailing approaches, topics, and characteristics of creativity- oriented Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. A selected sample based on yearly citations yielded 221 publications, which were analyzed using constant comparison analysis. We found that HCI is almost exclusively responsible for creativity-oriented publications; they focus on collaborative creativity rather than individual creativity; there is a general lack of definition of the term 'creativity'; empirically based contributions are prevalent; and many publications focus on new tools, often developed by researchers. On this basis, we present three implications for future creativity-oriented HCI research: develop and employ clearer definitions of creativity; go beyond in-vitro studies of novel tools; and move toward interdisciplinary research collaborations.