Understanding the Usefulness of Ideation Tools with the Grounding Lenses

Abstract

Many design studies were focused on how to form a card-based inspiration tool to support designers in the early stage of their design process. Although there is a great deal of studies on bridging the gap between design theories and instances through card-based design, however, there is little guidance, on how to pragmatically evaluate the usefulness. Using a set of deck, Interaction Tarot, based on the structure of Tarot, as an example, this paper argues that the Horizontal and Vertical Groundings (HG & VG), often used to generate intermediate-level knowledge such as strong concepts [12], can serve as analytical criteria for evaluating the quality of card-based design tool pragmatically. To address this, we conducted an HCI workshop with multiple brainstorming sessions with Interaction Tarot. The questionnaire data, tool usage, and interview accounts are categorized or quantified with respect to HG & VG, to ascertain how a card-based tool helps designers facilitate the design ideation in practical use. The findings could provide proper empirical evidence to demonstrate how design researchers use the set of two lenses (HG & VG) to have better understandings of a card-based tool in supporting the design inspiration.