Group Idea Processing System : GrIPS (<Survey Papers> Special Issue : Creative Thinking Support Systems)

Abstract

GrIPS is a groupware that aims to enhance people's creative abilities by assisting them in the creation and organization of ideas. The prototype of GrIPS works on three workstations connected by LAN and supports creative meetings, such as planning meetings. The methodological basis of GrIPS is diagram drawing, which consists of two stages, the idea divergence stage and the idea convergence stage. In the first stage, the participants of the meeting are encouraged to collect ideas in a brain-storming manner. In the second stage, they create a set of cards, each of which describes a collected idea, and draw a diagram that illustrates the groupings of the cards and the connections between them. The effective presentaion to the others could be done with the final diagram. GrIPS never substitutes the computation for human creativity, but it helps human activity, providing three new functions : associative keyword retrieval, automatic diagram drawing and individual-basis sound mixing. The associative keyword retrieval lists up lots of relative words, which can be picked up as elements of ideas in the first stage. The automatic diagram drawing converts a complex diagram into an easy-to-understand diagram that has the same structure as the original in the second stage. The redrawing is done by heuristics. The individual-basis sound mixing simulates the acoustic effects of a meeting room, by mixing the voice of each participant in appropriate proportion. It aims to compensate for the loss of communicating reality due to the distributed working environment.