MakeTools is a ’Äúgenerative tool for collective creativity’Äù according to its creator, Liz Sanders (www.maketools.com). A few of our team members were exposed to this creative research method through a design course at Carnegie Mellon. Operating on the philosophy that all people are creative, this method tries to get beyond traditional research formats by making research participants co-creators in the generative research process.
Our participants engaged in a creative exercise (in this case, collage creation) to answer two questions that are reviewed below.
Maketools Questions
1. What do you enjoy most about your work?
2. How could your work environment be improved?
3. How do you feel about your current documentation tools?
4. In your ideal world, how would you document your work?
We used the answers to these questions to help select a final concept and inform the design of that concept.

