From Knowing to Creating: Leveraging Increased Information Flow in Design for Improved Innovation Capacit

In design research, the early phases of the design process have been extensively explored by researchers and practitioners. Specifically, the role that information plays in influencing designer's cognition and creative outcomes has gained a wealth of attention. However, knowledge about the role of information in the design process is scattered across disparate domains and isolated studies, making challenging to understand how to best leverage large volumes of information for enhanced design creativity. This thesis addresses this need by developing and validating an initial typological framework of design information that would allow researchers and practitioners to empirically test the impact of information use on design outcomes. This is achieved through a field study with expert designers and two laboratory experiments with novice design students to understand the types of information used for generating new ideas during the design process. For this thesis, a web interface was developed to test the impact of information utilization on design creativity in a controlled lab setting. The results of this thesis identified major information dimensions that can describe early-phase design information and demonstrated an empirical link between different types of information and the creativity of novice design students. This work contributes to our understanding of information use and thinking styles in design education and highlights the potential for these factors to influence the creativity of design graduates. Lastly, the findings of this work contribute to the development of a Typological Framework of Information Archetypes that can be used by researchers in design to enhance our understanding of design cognition and creativity.