Sketching with strangers: collocated ideation at scale

Abstract

Brainstorming workshops typically scale poorly: as a group grows, the cost of coordinating ideas grows faster than the value of additional contributors. We present *Sketching with Strangers*, a collocated ideation method that pairs unfamiliar participants for short, structured sketching exchanges. Across three field studies (n = 142), participant pairs produced more concept diversity than equivalent solo or same-team conditions, while reporting higher psychological safety than whole-group critique. We discuss implications for hybrid-team workshops and offer a free facilitator's kit.

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Method

Three field studies across two universities, recruiting participants from mixed-discipline cohorts. Pairs were assigned by a constrained random matcher that maximized prior-acquaintance distance.

Findings

Three results we did not expect:

1. Concept diversity scaled with discipline distance more than with self-reported creativity.
2. Psychological safety in stranger-pairs exceeded same-team conditions, particularly for early-career participants.
3. Sketch volume was a poor predictor of downstream concept selection — judges preferred the median sketch from each pair, not the most numerous.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{ungurean2024sketching,
  title     = {Sketching with strangers: collocated ideation at scale},
  author    = {Ungurean, Ovidiu-Ciprian and Doe, Jane and Rossi, Marco},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  series    = {CHI '24},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {ACM},
  doi       = {10.1145/3613904.0000000}
}