A brief tour Some capabilities of the Muse studio for ideas iPad application.
Creative professionals need a place to develop their ideas. Digital authoring tools like Google Docs or Photoshop are designed to express ideas you’ve already developed, and productivity tools like email, calendar, or todo lists are good for tracking and administration. Surprisingly few digital tools exist for the early, freeform phase of ideation.
Building on the foundation of our earlier user research (Capstone, a tablet for thinking), we continue to explore tablet interfaces as a freeform thinking space. For this iteration, we took inspiration from physical spaces for idea gestation and crafting: libraries, workshops, drafting tables, and artists’ studios.
Creative people tend to nest. A professor in their classroom, a writer in their home office, a woodworker in their shop, an artist in their studio—these spaces are full of work surfaces like desks and drafting tables, drawers and pegboards full of tools, pinboards and chalkboards and whiteboards, scraps of paper, photos, books, printouts, works-in-progress, post-its, and more. They are messy, informal, mixed together, freeform, and personal.
Physical workspace A workspace that's personal and informal. (source)
Compare these to our digital workspaces: what we see on the screens of our computers, tablets, and phones. Lists and grids of items, neatly arranged by the computer (perhaps sorted by date or name). Media types are often siloed (text notes in one place, web pages in another, PDFs and their highlights in still another) and difficult to view together. We don’t entirely choose what goes into our workspaces and things don’t tend to stay where we left them. In short, digital workspaces are structured, sterile, and impersonal.
Creativity is about making connections. This seems to demand a freeform, fluid space where creative fodder can be mixed together and sorted to the user’s liking. So why are freeform environments so rare in digital workspaces?
Physical and digital workspaces typically have different properties. We explore bringing physical notions to a digital tool.
This led to our concept for this project. Inspired by physical workspaces, we set out to build a studio for ideas.
Based on the above comparison, we set out with the following design goals: