How Creative Practitioners Use Tools to Capture Ideas: A Cross-Domain Study

Creative practitioners rely on tools to capture and manage ideas as a foundational aspect of their work. However, we have little knowledge about how idea management practices vary in different creative domains. Combining insights from qualitative surveys (N 200) and follow-up in-depth interviews (n
60) with creative professionals from four domains (interaction design, research, music, and graphics) of creative work, we report on (1) how ideas are externalized in practitioners’ archives, (2) what they consider important when choosing tools to capture ideas, and (3) how these tool collections resemble and differ from each other. Our cross-domain study demonstrates that participants’ tool use reflects idea capture characteristic needs as well as domain-specific views about the creative process. We conclude with a discussion about capturing as an externalizing activity, practitioners’ use of the term ideas, and four suggestions for directions in the design of creativity support tools.