Freeform Templates: Combining Freeform Curation with Structured Templates

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Practitioners and students have increasingly adopted online whiteboards to facilitate collaborative design work. While such whiteboards provide endless space for ideating and curating, this can be challenging for non-experts who are less familiar with the design process. In these cases, templates provide novices with a more structured process and procedural guidance to fill gaps in expertise. However, few studies explore the effects of templates on creativity in free-form environments. Does the structure hinder free expression? How is creativity enabled within and around those scaffolds? Through a mixed-methods study with 114 introductory design students (34 teams), we found that templates give novices quick access to expert processes and enable teams to conceptually align with each other and with prior work sessions. The study also shows how novices worked creatively within and around the scaffolding. We observed visual patterns of free-form curation where concepts were spatially organized, clustered, color-coded, and connected using arrows and lines. We offer design implications for creating free-form templates and discuss the value of this approach for design settings with diversely skilled audiences.