Creative professionals need a place to develop their ideas. https://posteezy.com/worddrift-free-seo-web-tools-website-optimization 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, 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. A workspace that’s personal and informal. 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. A repository for creative inputs. The studio is a place to collect raw material as input to your thinking. This means everything together, with no media silos. If you get a critical mass of documents into the studio, connections will naturally form. These connections produce new ideas that can be captured in the studio-a virtuous cycle producing yet more fodder for generation of future ideas. Freeform and arranged by you. A spatial environment allows you to pull out excerpts, places things side by side, arrange them in a loose, freeform, fluid way. Multimedia. Text, photos, sketches, PDFs, web pages, diagrams-all together to reflect your variety in creative inputs and your own thinking. Inking everywhere. Drawings, annotations, marginalia. Not only can you see every media type together, but you can ink on everything without restriction. This supports everything from playful doodling to the serious study of active reading. Excerpting. In addition to freeform arrangement of entire documents, you may want to pull out just a sentence, a paragraph, a page, or a diagram from a longer document. No chrome. Avoid toolbars, buttons, or other administrative debris. Just you and your work. The studio presents only a blank page, quietly inviting you to capture your thoughts and develop your ideas. Fast. The studio should support creators moving at their natural speed of thought. It should never break the connection between user inputs and the reactions they observe from the tool. As an industry, we’ve underestimated how harmful slow software is for the creative process. It’s so discouraging and uncomfortable to do creative work when you’re waiting, looking at spinners, unsure if your last action registered. The studio for ideas should have no spinners, no waiting, and run at 120 frames per second. Documents open instantly. No command requires press-and-hold or other built-in delays. Use the full command gesture space. As a fast, precise tool for creative professionals, we should use every capability at our disposal. That means all ten fingers, and the stylus as a distinct input. The stylus is required. If the studio can achieve these goals, we hope it means you, the user, will be able to create more connections among ideas that before would have been siloed. That in turn means you can develop your ideas to the very fullest and thus reach your potential as a thinking, creating human. Thus we set out to build Muse, a studio for ideas inspired by physical workspaces. We have not achieved all the ideals set out in the previous section, but we did hit many of them. So now we’ll take a tour of the prototype and describe what we learned from seeing this in use by our team internally and in external users tests. A space for creativity requires raw material. This material is the fodder for our minds to generate new ideas. Thus our studio for ideas must make ingestion of different media types easy and painless. One ingestion route we focused on was users doing research on a web browser on their desktop computer.