A Card-Type Tool to Support Divergent Thinking for Embodying Benefit of Inconvenience

This paper proposes a card typed divergent thinking support tool to design systems that make use of FUBEN-EKI (FUrther BENEfit of a Kind of Inconvenience). Even the benefits of inconvenience are known as an essence of spiritually affluent live, there are few artifacts for providing such benefits. The proposed tool takes a leaf from TRIZ, which is a theory of inventive problem solving, and is based on the result of analyzing inconvenient tools and methods. The experimental result, reported in this paper, shows that ``principle cards,´´ which is a part of the tool, increase the number of ideas when the cards are used according to the rule which compels users to concentrate on creating ideas from each card.