A Research On Design Ideation Pattern Which Driven By Pictorial Inspiration Sources

In the information age,more and more designers obtain design inspiration through new technologies or methods.Digital inspiration tools,especially pictorial type of inspiration tools,is gradually getting into designer's vision.Thus,a more intelligent inspiration tool which has the ability to push inspiration materials according to the specific characteristics of designers or the specific needs for the ideation phases,is required for the next stage of inspiration tool evolution.Therefore,how do the pictorial inspiration sources affect the ideation process of different designers,and whether these effects have certain pattern or characteristics is apparently worthy of study.Understanding the rules or patterns of how pictorial inspiration materials drive designers' activities can give us certain theoretical references for the development and application of inspiration tools.This paper analyzes the influence of the ideation phases from two aspects:subjective cognition and objective response.This paper analyzes different cognitive theories and models,and thinks that the reflection model can describe the subjective cognition process of the designers more clearly.Through the literature analysis of design stimuli,this paper puts forward a discussion of objective response from the perspective of the distance of desgin stimuli.In addition,this paper analyzes a variety of ideation models,summarizing horizontal shift and depth development as two directions of problem space,and analyzes the potential ideation pattern of designers based on reflection model.Then,this paper ustilizes Linkography tool,which is featureed by visualizing the development path of design process,as the ideation process analysis method,and designs and implements an interface design experiment to observe and study the ideation pattern influenced by different distances of pictorial design stimuli.From the experiment the following findings can be observed:On one hand,when interacting with stimuli at different distances,designers feature with active ideation process will have a preference for depth development in problem space,and will oftenly review previous designs.On the other hand,designers present four different types of objective responses when facing with inspiration sources at different distances:(1)generally active type,(2)generally inactive type,(3)close stimuli active type and(4)far stimuli active type.Generally active type and generally inactive type of designers' ideation process would not be affected by the distances of design stimuli.Close stimuli active type of designers prefer to obtain explicit design knowledge from stimuli,which are close to the design topic,to actively generate ideas;far stimuli active type of designers are good at extracting elements from abstract pictorial stimuli which are proper for the design topic,to actively generate ideas.Providing suitable distance of stimuli to designers can guide them to have active design ideation process.