Scaling Creative Inspiration with Fine-Grained Functional Aspects of Ideas

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel automatic method to decompose product ideas into detailed functional aspects, enhancing creative search and exploration in large idea repositories, significantly improving user experience.

Contribution

It presents a new fine-grained functional representation of ideas that automates decomposition, enabling better search and exploration without manual effort or limited expressivity.

Findings

Boosts creative search quality by 50-60% in user studies

Enables exploration of design space through related problem perspectives

Outperforms strong baseline methods significantly

Abstract

Large repositories of products, patents and scientific papers offer an opportunity for building systems that scour millions of ideas and help users discover inspirations. However, idea descriptions are typically in the form of unstructured text, lacking key structure that is required for supporting creative innovation interactions. Prior work has explored idea representations that were either limited in expressivity, required significant manual effort from users, or dependent on curated knowledge bases with poor coverage. We explore a novel representation that automatically breaks up products into fine-grained functional aspects capturing the purposes and mechanisms of ideas, and use it to support important creative innovation interactions: functional search for ideas, and exploration of the design space around a focal problem by viewing related problem perspectives pooled from across many products. In user studies, our approach boosts the quality of creative search and inspirations, substantially outperforming strong baselines by 50-60%.