QWRKR (“Quirky Worker”) is a simultaneous organizational tool for the prototypical multi-colored post-it note ideation session. It comes as a suite of tools to help make these sessions more productive. [PDF]

Brainstorming produces an abundance of ideas, but team members often find it difficult to synthesize these ideas into actionable results. Additionally, analysis tends to occur after the fact rather than during the process of idea-generation. Typically, a team member is designated as “mediator” or “facilitator” for the ideation session—QWRKR takes on this role, organizing content on the fly and directing the brainstorm session to more productive results.

Faced with a chaotic wall full of ideas, humans tend to rely on simple, intuitive analytical tools to group and organize content, ignoring potentially valuable ideas.

1. Alternate organization schemes

Optical Character Recognition combined with Natural Language processing could discover latent organizational structures in the post-it data. By data mining Wikipedia and other web content, QWRKR could find associations between ideas as the team works, and check popularity to determine what ideas are trending and might be of higher value.

2. Visualizing Content

Visualizing content early can help team members discover unforeseen connections between ideas. This tool temporarily converts, with a single click, a post-it note into its corresponding image on Wikipedia. Clicking an image multiple times cycles through various associated images until appropriate.

3. Computer Vision

By tracking team members’ eye movements, QWRKR can create heat maps of ideas that are getting too much attention, and suggest focus on ideas being overlooked. As an additional association tool, it can track the sequence of focus through the idea set.

4. Semantic Organization

QWRKR can quickly re-arrange post-it data into sentences, creating surprising associations between ideas. These quasi-random reconfigurations could serve as a valuable lateral thinking aid for the team.

5. Idea Accumulation

Clicking on an idea in this mode automatically creates additional associated words or ideas around it, a directed brainstorming tool.

6. Directed Lateral Thinking

Oblique Strategies and other lateral thinking tools can help disrupt ossified thinking in the brainstorming process.

7. The Quirky Randomizer

This tool cycles through all tools at a controlled level of randomness. The ensuing cognitive dissonance can be productive, encouraging the team to reconfigure preconceived notions on the fly.