BrainTranscending: A Hybrid Divergent Thinking Method that Exploits Creator Blind Spots

Divergent thinking methods play a very important role in creating new ideas for planning and/or development activities based on specific themes or existing objects. However, even when using existing divergent thinking methods, it remains difficult to conceptualize truly novel ideas because creators are typically constrained by their fixed ideas. Therefore, we propose a novel divergent thinking method named “BrainTranscending (BT)” that exploits Brainstorming (BS), a typical divergent thinking method, as a way to identify the creator’s fixed ideas, rather than generate ideas, and thus support the further expansion of those ideas. We conducted user studies and confirmed that the number of idea groups that were created by BT significantly increased compared to typical brainstorming. Furthermore, the subjects evaluated the final ideas created with BT and determined that the quality was better than that of BS. We also propose the “Reduced BrainTranscending (RBT)” method for alleviating the heavy cognitive load that BT imposes on creators. We conducted user studies of RBT to investigate its usefulness and, consequently, concluded that BT and RBT are effective methods for supporting divergent thinking aimed at improving existing products.