Development of a PDA based idea collecting system and its application to an idea generation consistent support system

Abstract

We have developed an idea collecting software, called GMemo running on a Personal Digital Assistant (IBM Workpad). Users can collect and input ideas in free handwriting using GMemo immediately in anytime and anywhere, and use ideas as data for GUNGEN (Groupware for a New idea GENeration consistent support system) directly. Nine persons have used GMemo forJive months. The results of the application of GMemo show that a total of 290 pieces of data were collected and the mean value of characters in one idea was about 26, which was nearly the same as the conventional method of collecting ideas by paper media (e.g. Post-It notes). We performed KJ method (One of the famous idea generation method in Japan) twice from collected data and the results of them were similar to those of the conventional KJ method on papers.have developed an idea collecting software, called GMemo running on a PDA (IBM WorkPad) [SI. Users can collect and input ideas in free handwriting using GMemo immediately instead of paper media (e.g. Post-It notes) anytime and anywhere. Users can also use ideas, which were written by free hand, as data for GUNGEN and Wadaman [ 1,2] directly. Wadaman [9] is a multimedia database system based on Umesao's card system [lo]. We can reuse the results of the KJ method, performed by GUNGEN as topics for further ideas.We should apply GMemo to collect ideas in somewhere for evaluations. We are members of the Information Center in Wakayama University. Then, we applied GMemo to the daily work of the Center. We have collected ideas for 5 months using PDA by nine people. We carried out KJ method using handwritten data collected by GMemo. We mainly describe about the data collection in long-term by GMemo in this paper.