I-Corps: Transforming the Web to Support New Ideas: Beyond the Feed and the Board

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Web curation is a popular online activity people engage in to help them understand the digital content they encounter. Common techniques for doing this include bookmarks, documents, slides, blogs, boards, and social media feeds. However, these forms are linear and thus, restrictive. Web content is highly interconnected and dynamic. The proposed technology, IdeaMâché, provides people with easy and powerful tools that facilitate collecting, organizing, and presenting digital content in new ways which allow them to express relationships and synthesize ideas. IdeaMâché has the potential to transform how people interact with and think about their digital content. It is accessible to users of personal computers and mobile devices with web access. Students, educators, researchers, businesses, and anyone who works with information can benefit from our approach to discovering, assembling, learning from, and thinking about information online. The proposed innovation has the potential to bring expressive power to more people in diverse contexts, supporting learning and innovation, and advancing society?s well-being. This team has developed a cloud-based, interactive curation environment for gathering, assembling, annotating, and exhibiting digital content. Its unique value is derived through a powerful free-form and expressive medium of curation. It surpasses the static and constricting representations of PowerPoint slides, Pinterest boards, and Facebook feeds. Expected significant outcomes of the proposed work include: a free-form medium of curation that stimulates critical, associational, and creative thinking, support for spatial and visual transformations to help users juxtapose and synthesize emergent ideas through clippings and annotations, a zoomable user interface that makes use of cognitive chunking in order to support the meaningful assembly of large amounts of content, a spontaneous gathering interface that uses direct manipulation clipping to automatically capture contextual and personalized metadata, and the integrated exhibition and sharing of these curations in popular social media. The team hypothesizes that the proposed new technology will mitigate cognitive load, reduce effort, and provide expressive power for gathering, organizing, and exhibiting information. IdeaMâché has already been fruitfully used by over 4,000 students, spanning 11 course offerings in 5 departments, at Texas A&M University and Prairie View A&M. In order to help demonstrate the commercial potential of IdeaMâché during the I-Corps process the team will focus on improving areas that will provide greatest impact to potential customers. This includes improving the web presentation of IdeaMâché, expanding its social media integration, and allowing IdeaMâché web curations to be embedded in other web pages.