Sticky Creativity: Post-it® Note Cognition, Computers, and Design

Sticky Creativity: Post-It® Note Cognition, Computers, and Design presents the interesting history of sticky notes and how they have become the most commonly used design material in brainstorming, business model generation, and design thinking. The book brings together researchers from psychology, computer science and design in order to understand why and how sticky notes are used, why they work well, and whether sticky notes are replaceable or improvable by a digital counterpart. The book covers psychology, computers and design respectively. From a psychological perspective, cognitive and socio-cognitive theories are used to explain the functions sticky notes serve in idea generation and creative collaboration.

Following sections present the findings from three very different computerized instantiations of sticky notes and discuss the challenges and opportunities that arise when trying to digitize sticky notes.

• Highlights the benefits of sticky notes in idea generation and creative collaboration
• Explores the use of sticky notes in a variety of creative, design professional and educational settings
• Includes research perspectives from cognitive psychology, computer science and design studies

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academic Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780128165584

Book preview

Sticky Creativity

Post-it® Note Cognition, Computers, and Design

Edited by

Bo T. Christensen

Department of Marketing, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

Kim Halskov

School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Clemens N. Klokmose

School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Explorations in Creativity Research

Copyright

Contributors

Preface: An interview with Spencer Silver on the history of the Post-it® note

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. The properties of sticky notes for collaborative creativity: An introduction

A history of sticky note use

Properties of sticky notes in collaborative creativity

Conclusion

Section I. Psychology

Chapter 2. How sticky notes support cognitive and socio-cognitive processes in the generation and exploration of creative ideas

Introduction

The nature of creative cognition

Generative versus exploratory processes in creative cognition and the role of preinventive structures

Sticky-note support for generative processes in creative cognition

Sticky-note support for exploratory processes in creative cognition

Conclusions

Chapter 3. How do initial ideas evolve into final ones? Exploring the cognitive size, structure and life of ideas using sticky notes

Introduction

Methods

Results

Discussion

Chapter 4. Sticky ideas: A qualitative study of idea ownership during brainstorming sessions

Introduction

Theoretical framework

Methodology

Analysis

Part 1

Part 2

Limitations

Results and conclusions

Section II. Technology

Chapter 5. Digitizing sticky notes

Sticky note technologies

Digital sticky notes and related research

The overall study

The user study

(Digital) sticky note systems

Summary

Discussion

Summary

Chapter 6. Physical meets digital: Blending reality and computational power with digital sticky notes

Theoretical foundations – blended interaction

Use of sticky notes in design – an observational study

Designing blends to augment sticky notes with digital power

Section III. Design

Chapter 7. A study of a digital sticky note design environment

Introduction

Sticky notes and create design environments

The Cards & Boards system

Study design

Findings: a viable alternative to traditional setips using pen, paper, and sticky notes

Potentials: fluent collaboration, shareable materials, and persistent collections of project data

Limitations: hardware requirements, learning curves, and problems of combining digital and physical materials

Conclusion

Chapter 8. Off the wall: Creative use of Post-it® notes in artistic practice

Introduction

Background and context

Post-it® notes in artistic practice

Looking forward: a plurality of artistic strategies?

Chapter 9. A framework for sticky note information management

Introduction

Sticky notes as externalizations

Data collection and analysis

The 4C framework

Example analyses

Discussion

Chapter 10. Designing with sticky notes

Tutorial: designing an augmented sticky note

Conclusion

Index

Explorations in Creativity Research

Series Editor

James C. Kaufman

Copyright

Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier

125 London Wall, London EC2Y 5AS, United Kingdom

525 B Street, Suite 1650, San Diego, CA 92101, United States

50 Hampshire Street, 5th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States

The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Details on how to seek permission, further information about the Publisher’s permissions policies and our arrangements with organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Center and the Copyright Licensing Agency, can be found at our website: www.elsevier.com/permissions.

This book and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by the Publisher (other than as may be noted herein).

Notices

Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-12-816566-9

For information on all Academic Press publications visit our website at https://www.elsevier.com/books-and-journals

Publisher: Nikki Levy

Acquisition Editor: Nikki Levy

Editorial Project Manager: Barbara Makinster

Production Project Manager: Paul Prasad Chandramohan

Cover Designer: Mark Rogers

Typeset by TNQ Technologies

Contributors

Linden J. Ball,     School of Psychology, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, Lancashire, United Kingdom

Michael Mose Biskjaer,     Center for Digital Creativity, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Susanne Bødker,     Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Bo T. Christensen,     Department of Marketing, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

Peter Dalsgaard,     Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Aron D. Fischel,     Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Morten Friis-Olivarius

Department of Marketing, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark

Copenhagen Institute of NeuroCreativity, Copenhagen, Denmark

Florian Geyer,     University of Konstanz, Human-Computer Interaction Group, Konstanz, Germany

Kim Halskov,     School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Eve Hoggan,     Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Sille Julie J. Abildgaard,     Department of Marketing, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

Mads Møller Jensen

Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

The Alexandra Institute, Aarhus, Denmark

Clemens N. Klokmose,     School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Lindsay MacDonald Vermeulen,     Center for Digital Creativity, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Wendy E. Mackay,     Inria Saclay, Orsay, France

Roman Rädle,     Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Harald Reiterer,     University of Konstanz, Human-Computer Interaction Group, Konstanz, Germany

Sarah-Kristin Thiel,     Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Johannes Zagermann,     University of Konstanz, Human-Computer Interaction Group, Konstanz, Germany

Preface: An interview with Spencer Silver on the history of the Post-it® note

In the eyes of the user, a Post-it® note is deceptively simple: a small piece of paper with a thin strip of adhesive. Thus, it may come as a surprise to some that the development of the adhesive, its application context, and its means of production, took more than a decade. At the time 3M launched the Post-it® note nationally in 1980, it had already been a long time since Spencer Silver (working for 3M) in 1968 had invented the adhesive that makes sticky notes sticky, and since Arthur Fry in 1974 (also at 3M), had applied that adhesive to what he considered a sticky bookmark, and conceptualized the new means of production necessary.

For this preface, we asked Spencer Silver for an interview so he could take us back fifty years in time to where it all began. Below is his recollection of the process of how the Post-it® note was developed, and how sticky notes became sticky.

How did it all start?

My contribution to the whole thing was really from the technology side. I have a Ph.D. in chemistry, so I developed the adhesive. Art (Arthur) Fry was the one who really came up with the idea for Post-it® notes as they exist now. He and his marketing people really made all of the important decisions about what to make, and how to make it. But it was definitely an evolutionary process, maybe based on an idea, but no-one ever figured it would be successful as a product. It was not from the get go (laughs) a good idea - nobody thought it was a great idea.

It all started 50   years ago, in 1968. I was in a corporate laboratory in Central Research at 3M, called Sky Blue. I was in a group called the Adhesives Technology Centre. Our purview was to look at any aspect of pressure sensitive adhesion. This is the type of adhesive that is on tape products and on Post-it® notes. Our idea was just to explore this whole area and find out new materials that could be exploited by 3M to make new tape products with enhanced or unusual properties.

Even though it was not part of the job description, I was curious about water soluble adhesives that would become pressure sensitive, so I experimented with that. This would be a unique combination, because most water soluble adhesives are sticky because they have water, and when the water dries they are plastic and they have no adhesion at all. So I was exploring ideas of ways of making these materials. I carried out an experiment, and it gave me something totally unexpected.

The unexpected product had very tiny particles with the unique aspect that when you mix them with some of the solvent they wouldn't dissolve - they would swell and stay as particles. So when you coted these from a dispersion in the solvent, they regenerated a particular surface. So it was kind of a topological adhesive if you will; it wasn't flat. All the adhesives in the world are flat except for Post-it® adhesive, which is not flat. That lack of flatness, or that topology, is the thing that really gives it its unique properties.

Most people think of adhesives as something that's got solvent or water in it which will evaporate over time. Well, this adhesive will never stop being sticky, because it's an Elastimor; it's a rubbery material that has its properties set in such a range that it's permanently tacky to the touch. We were exploring and learning about that in our Adhesives Technology Center in the sixties. The area of study is called polymeriology, which is the flow properties of polymers. You design your polymers so that they, under the conditions of you touching it in a one-second time period, flow and wet your finger and create tack. That's what pressure sensitive tack is. But then when you remove your finger, the polymer properties shift because of the time effects.

This was scientifically interesting to me for a couple of reasons. When I look back at the prevailing chemical literature at the time, they said this process of making it shouldn't work. When you make small sticky particles in a water suspension they tend to stick to each other and you end up making basketballs rather than fifty micron sized particles. No-one thought this kind of suspension process would work with an inherently tacky polymer. So this process should have failed, and every time we ran it in the laboratory, my boss said you have to repeat it and we kept running it and running it, but it was a failsafe, which is very unusual. For most small chemical reactions in the laboratory, the first time it may work well. The second time it works pretty good, but the third time it may fail completely. You try it again to decide which parameters you have not controlled for and improve the process, and eventually make something that works all the time. It was easy to make; it had this curious property in that the particles would swell up when you put them in solvent. The particles are about fifty microns, so it's about the diameter of a human hair. You could almost see them. If you run a magic marker over the adhesive on a Post-it® note and look at it with a small magnifier, you can see the particles. They swell in solvent, but when you coat them it contracts. If you then put them in solvent again, they swell again. So they had this kind of magical property - they had a built in structure like they had been molded into this spherical shape and nothing was going to make them change that spherical shape. That's really why a Post-it® works the way it does, because when you press it down, it forms a bond and when you remove it, the particles stay as particles, snapping back to form a sphere. It's very reversible. The fact that they're discrete particles and not coating the whole surface means there are places for foreign material, dirt and whatever, to accumulate in between the particles so the adhesion is repeatable. In comparison, if you take a piece of magic tape and stick it on your jacket, and then remove it - then when it sticks a second time it's got very little adhesion. Third time - forget about it, it's covered with stuff. But the discrete particles on the Post-it® allow the dirt to accumulate between the particles, so it's permanently sticky. I have adhesive made in 1982 and it's still sticky. It'll be sticky forever, because that's the property of the adhesive. It's the property of the polymers that make up the adhesive; it's the property of the construction.

We discovered this stuff and we tried a lot of things. We made bulletin boards out of it, and it was a great way to make a bulletin board. You could stick things to it and remove it. 3M actually sold that for a little while, but it was never anything big, probably a 2–3 million dollar market. A market that size is chicken feed, so it wasn't worth pursuing. Although they still make that stuff.

So it was really a fascinating material, I couldn't give up on it. It was something unique, it was patentable, but we just could not convince the company to invest heavily in something that was way outside their area of expertise. A guy named Bob Olivero, who was my lab partner, was a biochemist. When he saw the bulletin board he said Spence, I know this is a great idea, we're gonna sell this. Bob loved the salesmanship stuff. It was his idea to make small bulletin boards—11.5 by 11 inches—and we'd give these to all the secretaries of technical directors at 3M that we wanted to interest in the product. Because at that time you couldn't just knock on the door and have a technical director say hey, come in tell me what you got. They were off busy doing other stuff. So we gave small boards to the secretaries with the idea that they'd have them on their desk and the director would walk by and say what's that, that's pretty cool. Can I get some of that stuff too? We then connected with two people, two technical directors, who invited us in. I gave talks to their research groups - maybe 3–5 people in small seminars. That's what got people engaged.

The big problem with this kind of novel idea, this kind of invention, is that if you go into a laboratory full of people that are doing product development, then those guys are all 100% dedicated to the products they're working on. So you're basically asking them to work overtime to develop your idea. That's where 3M comes in. 3M have what they call ‘15% time’, where you can spend 15% of your time on anything you want to. Now, I'd say personally my observation was that probably fifteen to twenty percent of the people actually used that fifteen percent time. Most of the time they just drank coffee or did something else or just worked on their own projects. I used to expand it, sometimes it got to be like thirty percent, but as long as I could keep my local management happy with my ideas, they were happy with that too. So that's where people would work on these novel or odd kinds of ideas. It had to be pretty rock solid, it had to be reproducible, it had to be manufacturable. My big problem was taking it from the laboratory to the production plant. In the lab I could make two-three hundred grams easy, but if I wanted to make, say, ten-twenty kilos, or a hundred kilos, I had to go to a plant to do that. There I had another guy come in with terrific plant expertise. He ran the first production runs for the Post-it® adhesive in his division, and the first things he made were basketballs, not the tiny microspheres.

When you have a thousand gallon reactor with spheres of adhesive that big, it tends to shake the building. It was literally shaking on its foundations, which was scary. But we figured out what it was - it was a real tough problem, but it was also a very simple solution. Once you figured it out, then it's been a lead pipe kind of production, which the engineers love.

That's kind of the whole thing. That's compressing probably five years of arduous, head scratching and teeth gnashing work into fifteen minutes. That's the thing that I think people miss when they write about this - they don't realize how long a period of time it really was. Perseverance is a word that's used cavalierly I think, and I think most people don't realize that perseverance is just a lot of damn hard work and headbutting. It took me at least six or seven years before I found somebody that was interested in developing the adhesive. Which is a long time, actually. But it turns out if you look at some of the old literature, papers published by people at IBM and GE, they say that that's typical. If you have something that's quite different, that's out of the norm for what a company does, then you're looking at seven to ten years before a product results in something. That was true in the seventies; I don't know if it is true now.

I moved around within Central Research and I was actually in a bio-sciences laboratory working on something totally different, and I got connected with the people in what's now Commercial Office Supply Division, and they wanted to explore this as an adhesive on paper. So we transferred the concept to this Commercial Office Supply Division, and Art Fry started working on it. One story is that Art Fry in 1974 was trying to make a bookmark for his hymn book that would not fall out while singing in his church choir at North Presbyterian Church, when he realized that my adhesive might do the job. I don't know whether this happened or not. It's mainly a good story and it's certainly a part of our 3M mythology now. One of the ideas was to make bookmarks for students because we thought it would be really great for kids in college and law students especially, and it might also work as removable, returnable labels for packages. Art talks about how he used to send notes to, I think, his brother or father, where he put on the address label, and the receiver would take it off and put it on the return, and then it would go back and forth. They could do this quite a few times and get through US mail. And when you can do that - get through US mail more than once without the label getting destroyed - that's a good thing.

We also got help from the president of the company at the time. The CEO Allen Jacobson liked it, he said this is a great product. One of the things that Al liked about it was its removability and that you could send samples to other people in the mail. So he kind of short circuited at least three layers of management. When the CEO says he thinks it's a good idea, then people start to pay attention.

Art Fry had the idea to coat this on a piece of paper, and then use the world as a bulletin board rather than making a bulletin board you stick stuff to. Coating these things on paper was a whole new thing, and that's what Art Fry really did. The critical factor was learning how to manufacture it. Art Fry invented that. The story, which I think is true, is that he built the first machine to coat them in his basement. He's a pretty good craftsman. He built it out of wood and they had to knock a hole in his wall to get the machine out into the laboratory. How he applied the strip in his basement I don't know, it's a mystery to me, I wasn't involved. In that time I was doing research in bio-sciences. But I think the critical thing was some early work that was done by the people who are unsung heroes, the ones that worked in the laboratory with Art to decide how big the strip should be, what were the best performance characteristics for that strip, and what kind of paper to use.

It took Art a bunch of years to convince people that consumers would pay a dollar seventy-nine for something that size. The marketing guys would say well I can buy that piece of paper for fifty cents. How could I sell them a sticky one for that much money?. The marketing guys reluctantly took it out to market under the name of ‘Press ‘n Peel.’ They gave people brochures that described the product and how it worked, and the people read the brochures and said well it sounds interesting, but we're not interested. It wasn't until 3M did something they called the Boise Blitz, which is the small town of Boise, Idaho, that this changed. They gave every business in town the brochure again, but this time they gave them samples. Then they came back a couple of weeks later and said what did you think?, and they filled in this questionnaire. Everybody said they would buy it! I mean it was like, marketing said this is wrong, because most of the time we get like fifty percent or maybe forty-five percent of people who say they'll buy the product, but here everybody said it - almost a hundred percent. So they took it again to Richmond, Virginia, did the same thing and it was again a big winner there. So they did a limited product introduction in the Pacific North West, and it sold like hot cakes. So then they expanded it a little bit more in the Pacific North West. Again, it sold like hot cakes. It went crazy.

It was really an interesting story of perseverance, both on my part and on Art's part, to get this pushed out into the marketplace. It's not one thing; it's a whole galaxy of observations that people have made and said this is what I think will work, and it all finally comes together in an iterative process that occurs, again, over several years.

The official launch date of the Post-it® note, I think, is something like 1980–81. It depends on who you ask; there's a lot of different opinions on the official launch date, because it started out in a small market in the Pacific Northwest then expanded, and then, in a relatively short period of time, it went national. But it was somewhere in that period.

Why is the Post-it® note designed the way it is?

Originally it was only one square size because that's all they thought would sell. They used to sell smaller ones but they were never very popular, and they were probably harder to make. Part of the thing that determines the final product is the machine that makes it. To be honest with you, I have never seen the production line! Very few people have. I have even been to Kentucky, we have a dedicated line down there, and the doors are closed; it's all blocked off and nobody goes in, not even the inventor of the adhesive! 3M can be a little bit paranoid about things. The size of the stripe I think was really determined by the performance, in other words if the stripe is too big it doesn't change the performance very much and so the tendency is to see how small you can go, using the smallest amount of material. Then if it works the way you want it to, that's what you zero in on.

The signature color of Post-its is called canary yellow or Turner's yellow. There are two versions of the color theory. One is that they thought attorneys would love this color, since attorneys like yellow legal pads, so do yellow. The other one that Art talks a lot about is that the yellow wouldn't copy on copying machines at that time, so you could put a note on something copying it and you wouldn't see the note. And it's a popular color; it was innocuous - there is no boy/girl sex thing associated with that color yellow, it's neutral. It stood out - people could see it; they liked it. Only in recent times has it become lots and lots of colors, because again marketing drives this stuff, everything the laboratory does. If marketing says we can't sell five different colors, it's too complicated then you don't do five colors. So if the laboratory says I think this is really big and marketing is saying well I'm not sure you're right, then we'll start small and get big later.

Another important thing when comparing it to electronic versions of the Post-it® note is that it’s tactile. To me as an artist, I like tactile things. I like to be able to touch surfaces. I have a friend who is a sculptor and I like talking with him about the importance of this in how you experience the object and experience the process. So that's my spin on that.

Another cool thing - you might not think about this, no-one knows the answer to this: When you take a Post-it® block out of the package, you can't really find what edge the adhesive is coated on. If you take a micrometer, there is no difference. In fact it's a little thinner where the adhesive is, even though the adhesive is half the thickness of the paper. So if I have fifty sheets of Post-it® paper and fifty coatings of adhesive, it should be proportionally thicker on that side. Imagine a lumpy pad like that. Now some were made like this, I think it was a Swiss invention that used continuously coated adhesive, but it didn't look very good, because one side would be twice as thick, and it would be unacceptable as a notepad. No one predicted that, no one knew that would happen. In fact they were in production and the laboratory said try this out, did you know that that side is the same thickness as the other side? Do you know how important that is for the packaging guys? It's a little cellophane wrapper and they can't have a cellophane wrapper that's lumpy on one side. So that's something that was totally fortuitous, no one predicted it, and I think if it hadn't been for that aspect this wouldn't have been a success.

Finally, Post-it's® are very versatile– they can be used for many different purposes and in different contexts. Art Fry loves that aspect; he thinks that Post-it® notes allow people to be inventors. That's his line: he said it. It allows people to make their own inventions. It's kind of like the prototypical invention that you can then take to invent other things. People love to do that, because it makes them part of the process as opposed to just simply using a product and then putting it away. Maybe that's the trouble with the digital version of the Post-it®: you're not doing any invention of your own, you're just manipulating a screen. You're not inventing a piece of art or inventing a shape or... As a visual artist I know that's true. So it allows people to have some minor input in turn, on an important aspect of innovation, which is great. It's a very simple thing you can invent with.

Interview by Bo T. Christensen

Copenhagen Business School

Acknowledgments

The making of this book started 5   years ago, at the very first joint meeting of ‘Creativity in Blended Interaction Spaces’, a research project sponsored by Innovation Fund Denmark (grant number 1311-00001B). Attending that meeting were many of the people that are now contributors to this book volume. At the time we were discussing how to design digital tools that might support situated creative interaction in blended environments. Someone at the meeting made the comment that we should not just try to make a digital version of a sticky note. From there the conversation took a surprising turn, as we realized that we all agreed that sticky notes support creative collaboration extremely well, but we had next to no theoretical justification for why that was the case. The idea was simple and short enough to fit on a standard 3   ×   3 inch note: Why do sticky notes work so well in creative collaboration? This simple question stuck with us over the remaining parts of the research project and partly drove our research agenda. This book volume constitutes our best efforts to it's resolve. Thanks are due to the authors who later joined our journey in understanding and developing the sticky note. The research project ‘Designerly ways of teaching for entrepreneurship in higher education’, later helped support work done in the first book section (sponsored by Independent Research Fund Denmark, grant number 8108-00031B). Many positive things will be said in this book on the use of sticky notes in ideation and creative collaboration, making it relevant to mention that our research has not