Trellis: A Blog-Based Approach to the Development, Organization, and Visualization of Ideas

Abstract

The creative process is often indirect. Ideas may come in bursts, evolve gradually, or include missteps and false turns. It is helpful to have a scaffold to maintain a history of thoughts and provide structure onto which nascent ideas can be stored and expanded. “Trellis” is a model for implementing such scaffolds, based on two maturing technologies, blogging and radial mapping. Although common methodologies for developing ideas are traditionally implemented on paper, they are particularly suited for the digital realm. Rather than re-interpreting these methods, Trellis provides a centralized, hierarchical container for the information associated with an idea, visualizes the connections between ideas, and allows the user to travel backward in time to monitor the evolution of a project. This approach conjoins the real-world creative processes of thinking, writing, and collaborating – with a digital space for storing, collecting, and visualizing the result of an intellectual activity.