SEARCHING FOR INSPIRATION DURING IDEA GENERATION PICTURES OR….pdfVIP

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN CONFERENCE - DESIGN 2012 Dubrovnik - Croatia, May 21 - 24, 2012. SEARCHING FOR INSPIRATION DURING IDEA GENERATION: PICTURES OR WORDS? C. Cardoso, M. Gonçalves and P. Badke-Schaub Keywords: inspiration, idea generation, pictorial and written stimuli 1. Introduction People from different professional arenas search for inspiration in a number of sources, be it in memories from past experiences or in the physical environment that surrounds them. Purposefully or unconsciously, scientists, artists, writers and different types of designers for instance, come across diverse types of stimuli that they expect might help them in understanding, developing or working out a situation at hand. In design, particularly, looking for inspiration is a frequent activity, which can take place in the designers’ mind, but also while browsing and interacting with existing types of precedents, with design practitioners being quite sensitive to various types of external stimuli, especially visual representations in their surroundings. This is often the case because most designers aim at generating creative design ideas, and exposing themselves to an amalgamation of directly and indirectly related information is expected to trigger novel ways of solving problems. This is also related to the constant demand to be both updated as well as ahead of existing competitors, with the ultimate aim of generating innovative creative ideas. 2. The prevalence of pictorial stimuli It is generally accepted that designers have a tendency to physically or mentally retain diverse visual representations they come across, aimed at serving as inspiration in different points during their creative processes [Goldschmidt and Sever, 2010]. Whilst confirmation of this practice is mostly a