Impact of inspiration sources on designer’s idea generation strategy

Abstract

The idea generation phase in the design process is often referred to as ‘the fuzzy front end’, which combing inspiration from a large amount of stimuli and pilot experience into concepts. How to lead designers is a significant task in design method research. This paper is firstly aim at visualising the idea generation and concept deepening processes of designers with different levels of design experiences. Second, to find out the influence of inspiration sources with different stimulation distance on designers’ creativity, and classify designers’ preference of inspirational stimuli. This paper select design students and expert designers who have more than two years experience as test subjects. Two groups of subjects are asked to conduct same design task within a certain period of time. The design task involves three sub-sessions, each of which provides a type of stimulus information, including text, pictures and design plans, representing different levels of stimulation distance, and requires the subjects generate design alternatives as much as possible based on the given stimuli. Observe the subjects’ design outputs under different inspiration sources, using the extended linkography as a tool to visualise designers’ problem space evolution. It measures the designers’ creativity and fixation preferences of different inspiration sources by analysing the number of design alternatives, the number of transformation links and stimuli distance. This paper may have significance for the study of idea generation methods and the development of related tools.