Integrating Computational Thinking in Co-Ideation Process : A Toolkit for Idea Generation

Abstract

Ideation is hard at any contexts. It is highly dependent on one’s personal knowledge and experience, and its process is also oblique to rationalize the outcomes. How to make this process tune into a more systematic manner is key to the design science discipline. This study is thus to develop a new ideation framework that inserts the “Computational Thinking” approach (inter alia, Turning Learning Paradigm) into the traditional ideation process. This ideation framework was implemented in an ideation toolkit, where the design resources (Persona, UX design principles, Technology & Functions, Trends) are included. Further, a gaming protocol with these resources was employed for the teams to compete as well as cooperate, by which the ideas from this game- play can naturally evolve. A scaled-up usability study of this toolkit against the traditional brainstorming proved that our coopetition toolkit helped the attendees in the ideation session to not being constrained in their own design knowledge, and extending their solution spaces by the extent that the design resources would detail. This hints that both competitive intelligence and cooperative reciprocity are being facilitated by this ideation framework. A lack of applications of this toolkit is to address in the near future.