Using metrics of curation to evaluate information-based ideation. submitted to

Evaluating creativity support environments is challenging. Some approaches address people’s experiences of creativity. The present method measures creativity, across conditions, in the products that people make. This research introduces information-based ideation (IBI), a paradigm for investigating open-ended tasks and activities in which users develop new ideas. IBI tasks span imagining, planning, and reflecting on a weekend, vacation, outfit, makeover, paper, internship, thesis, design, campaign, crisis response, career, or invention. What products do people create through engagement in IBI? Curation of digital media incor-porates conceptualization, finding and choosing information objects, annotation, and synthesis. Through engagement in IBI tasks, people create curation products. This article formulates a quantitative methodol-ogy for evaluating IBI support tools, building on prior creative cognition research in engineering design to derive a battery of ideation metrics of curation. Elemental ideation metrics evaluate creativity within curated found objects. Holistic ideation metrics evaluate how a curation puts elements together. IBI support environments are characterized by their underlying medium of curation. Curation media include lists, such as listicles, and grids, such as the boards of Pinterest. An in-depth case study investigates information composition, an art-based medium representing a cu