Capturing and revisiting ideas in the design process: A longitudinal technology probe study

Managing ideas is a central activity of professional designers and an essential element in the creative design process. However, while designers use a diverse range of tools to capture, manage, and recollect ideas, they often lack well-established and proven efficient routines for doing so. To better understand how these idea-centered design processes play out and, potentially, might be improved, we conducted a longitudinal study with ten professional designers where we deployed a technology probe in the form of an app, Recollect, to explore critical aspects of their idea management practices. Based on weekly interviews, we contribute four central insights, which pairwise form two current tensions related to idea capture and idea recollection among designers. These two tensions are that 1) designers have similar conceptions of what constitutes a good design idea, but have very diverse practices for working with ideas; and that 2) designers find value in revisiting ideas, but lack structured and efficient approaches for doing so. We discuss the implications of these findings, and we propose that the complexity of designers' idea management practices call for more research.