Understanding Creative Thinking Processes in Searching for New Ideas

Creative thinking processes involve a set of cognitive operations and behaviors people engage to generate new ideas and solutions. Information searching is an integral part of the creative thinking process. The purpose of this study is to discover the creative thinking processes and search strategies students use to generate new ideas in academic and everyday life information use contexts. The data were collected through a pre-task interview, a search session for a creative task, and a post-task interview. Fifteen graduate students at a research university participated in the study. From the data analysis, we identified four distinctive, yet interconnected creative thinking processes: planning for creative search tasks, searching for new ideas, synthesizing search results, and organizing ideas. Based on these findings, we point out the need to design search systems to support creative thinking processes during searching to facilitate generation of new ideas.