Capstone is an experimental tool for creative professionals to develop their ideas. It explores questions about digital information curation; how creative people come up with good ideas; and what we at Ink & Switch think the future of power-user computing interfaces could look like.
The prototype is built around a two-step creative process where the user first collects raw material on their desktop computer and later does their thinking on a tablet with stylus. It offers mixed media cards plus freeform inking, spatial navigation, and a shelf which serves as a portal between devices and a reimagined copy-paste. Findings include success with hybrid finger+stylus gestures, the chalk-talk use case, and the unsolved problem of stylus tool-switching.
This manuscript documents the project’s design decisions and what we learned from user testing. We encourage you to borrow these ideas — or use them as cautionary tales — in your own tablet app or desktop app development. The Capstone codebase is open-source and can be installed as a Chrome App on any Chrome OS device that includes a stylus.
We welcome your thoughts, questions, or critique: @inkandswitch or hello@inkandswitch.com
Leading up to this project, our team interviewed dozens of creative professionals such as professors, authors, film-makers, and web designers. Although the details of how these pros work are different, a pattern emerged in this research: they all live or die by the strength of their ideas.
But ideas aren’t summoned from nowhere: they come from raw material, other ideas or observations about the world. Hence a two-step creative process: collect raw material, then think about it. From this process comes pattern recognition and eventually the insights that form the basis of novel ideas.
Leonardo da Vinci is the quintessential collect-then-think creative professional. His notebooks include observations from the natural world, excerpts from books he has read; then he develops his own ideas in written or sketched form. See Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Issacson. Image from the British Library's digitized manuscripts.
The collection step is gathering raw material in the form of sketches, photos, websites, text excerpts, and manuscripts in a single location. This can happen all at once in a binge-research session or it can be a slow curation over months or years.