3/9/2017 Luis A. Vasconcelos; Carlos C. Cardoso; Maria Sääksjärvi; Chih-Chun Chen; Nathan Crilly
J. Mech. Des. 2017; 139(3):031101-031101-13
doi: 10.1115/1.4035540External inspiration stimuli can be very effective to help designers arrive at new ideas that they would be otherwise unlikely to generate. However, exposure to external stimuli can also hinder creativity and fixate designers on particular features of such stimuli. We conducted an experiment with novice designers to compare the inspiration effects from two stimuli types: a concrete example solution (a bike) and an abstract property that a solution might incorporate (modularity). Working alone in a short design session, participants were asked to generate ideas to eliminate the need for people to have multiple bikes as they grow up. We found that exposure to either the concrete example or the abstract property reduced the total number of ideas generated and how diverse those ideas were, and that exposure to both stimuli (together) reduced these measures even further. We also found that each stimulus affected participants differently, encouraging ideas like one type of stimulus, while discouraging ideas like the other type. These findings reinforce the idea that external stimuli can hinder creativity and should be accessed carefully. They also show how concrete and abstract stimuli can produce similar inspiration effects, challenging our intuitions about how to encourage wide-ranging ideas. This has the potential to shape how design is taught and how inspiration tools are developed.

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