Can “Semi-relevant Images” Vitalize Brainstorming?

Abstract

A lot of supporting tools for vitalizing brainstorming sessions have been proposed. Some of them show the participants hints for discussions, e.g. keywords and images. The author’s research group also has proposed a supporting system for vitalizing brainstorming sessions. In the system, “semi-relevant images,” which are relevant images of the relevant words of words used in created ideas, are shown for participants of a brainstorming as hints. Despite the system works well for vitalizing discussions, the effects of this type of hint had not been investigated. Thus, experiments were conducted to show the effects. In the experiments, effects of three types of hints, (1) relevant keywords; relevant words of the words used in ideas presented in the discussion, (2) relevant images; images retrieved by using words used in ideas presented in the discussion as keywords, and (3) semi-relevant images; images retrieved by using relevant words of the words used in ideas presented in the discussion as keywords, were compared. The results show that the third type of hints can increase number of utterances and diversity of the subjects in discussions.