Looking Sideways
An inspiration tool that presents a diverse range of content for each search query and suggests connections for the concepts discovered
How can searching for inspiration online feel serendipitous?
Be it physical or digital, creatives often make collages or mood boards to help loosely synthesize the vast array of inspiration they collect; these curations present a “landscape of different possibilities [from which] new combinations” can be discovered. The Looking Sideways tool aims to make searching for inspirational content online feel like this lateral thinking experienced when jumping between ‘creative watering holes’ or juxtaposing content on a mood board.
Searching laterally
Looking Sideways was inspired by considering how designers could more deeply explore the concepts provoked by the Reframe tool by searching for information or visual content related to the words in the prompts, using the many different “creative watering holes” that they visit to find inspiration for their designs, e.g. Pinterest, Dribbl, Google, magazines, books, art galleries, films etc. An excellent analog example of this process is the book The Art of Looking Sideways (Fletcher, 2001); an “inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories” collected over 20 years by designer Alan Fletcher. This content is loosely collected into 72 chapters that position, for example, quotes from scientists next to a doodle of robots next to a modernist poem next to a description of a chess move; reading it is an exercise in lateral thinking in itself!
Some of the inspiration sources designers use
A chapter from Fletcher’s Looking
An unoptimized search engine for more inspiring query results
At its core, Looking Sideways is a search engine. Yet, unlike other search engines it does not attempt to optimize the content presented to the user. For every search query, Looking Sideways collects content from a diverse range of online databases—Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Harvard Art Museum, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, Giphy animated images, news, National Geographic, and New Scientist—and presents users with a random selection of that image or textual content. Clicking on these ‘nodes’ activates another search query based on the metadata of that content.
With this semi-random selection of both visual and text-based content, Looking Sideways provides a more visual accomplice to ReFrame’s semantic juxtapositions. However, unlike ReFrame, Looking Sideways has a feature that can aid in the abductive leaps that helps users find associations between the seemingly disconnected content presented. The ‘association feature’ uses the ConceptNet commonsense semantic knowledge graph (Speer et al., 2017) to offer suggestions for concepts that can connect two words, e.g. ‘vessel’ is related to ‘mug’ which is used for ‘coffee’.
Other features include: selecting or adding specific content from the available content sources, adding annotated links between content nodes, deleting nodes, saving the exploration, and connecting content found on Looking Sideways to the Design Daydreams post- it note.
Looking Sideways in the real world
“Looking Sideways power is in its potential to resist against convergence and to leverage ambiguity to push the creator out of her/his comfort zone.”
In the latter phases of the design process, designers can often become bound to using one tool due to a lack of interoperability (Bernal et al. 2015). Conversely, in the earlier, more bricolage explorations designers visit many ‘creative watering holes’ and flit between many different tools and methods to discover new ideas. As with all of the tools I create, the Looking Sideways tool was not designed to act alone, but be one element in a bulging toolbox that designers can use to find inspiration. In order to discover how Looking Sideways could be effective as part of this toolbox, I conducted several user studies in lab and ‘in the wild’.
A user testing Looking Sideways in a lab study
The lateral nature of responses given by the tool was appreciated by many participants as “the system's power is in its potential to resist against convergence and to leverage ambiguity to push the creator out of her/his comfort zone.” In particular, users liked that the search results were not defined by popularity as with Google’s search engine.
Fairly often, the responses to a search word returned different and unexpected interpretations of the concept. For example, when exploring the word ‘waves’, one participant expected to see content related to ocean waves but was pleasantly surprised when information about the physics of waves was returned, a reinterpretation that helped widen her understanding of a founding concept in her project. Another participant’s project was designing a radio-style app and so he was very focused on digital concepts about storytelling. Looking Sideways had other ideas, though; presenting images of mid-century radio sets and letters, the participant was prompted to think of how the physical artifacts that we used to gather around and communicate through could be metaphors for his app.
The feature that particularly helped guide participants through the open-ended liminal space of information and ideas presented by Looking Sideways was the association tool as it “helped bridge concepts that are not necessarily (or evidently) related”. In particular, the ability to semantically connect disparate concepts enabled them to feel “unafraid to go off on a tangent” and explore further afield to identify new conceptual horizons.
Examples of inspiration searches using Looking Sideways
Publications & presentations
Published in The Design Journal as part of the proceedings of the 13th International Conference of the European Academy of Design Running with Scissors, Dundee 2019
Presented at corporate innovation events including organizations such as Samsung, Google, Steelcase, IDEO, Deloitte, Estee Lauder from 2018-2019