An Exploration of Design Students' Inspiration Process.

Abstract

Our purpose was to explore how different sources of inspiration influenced two groups of students' inspiration process and their attitudes toward their design projects. Assigned sources of inspiration and instructor's assistance in search for inspiration varied for two groups of students completing a small culture inspired product design project in an introductory design class. One group was free to select any culture as an inspiration source; other group was assigned a specific culture and was provided with information and visuals about assigned culture's design environment. We asked students to explain their inspiration process and their attitude towards design project via a self-administered questionnaire. Their responses indicate that many students enjoyed project in both groups, but they failed to understand importance of locating appropriate research sources. We believe that although design students need autonomy to develop their own design skills, novice design students need instructor's intervention in early stages of design process to learn value of appropriate research in design process. Keywords: design education, design process, inspiration, teaching Introduction The design process is a form of problem solving. Designers rely on experience, knowledge, imagination and creativity to find a solution to design problem (Wylant, 2008). Inspiration is a key part of design process. Inspiration is the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.). Designers can be inspired by anything, from something tangible like an object or intangible like an abstract concept of a phenomenon (Eckert, Stacey & Clarkson 2000). Exploring inspiration process can provide valuable information about successful and creative design solutions. Learning about design inspiration is important for beginning design students. As instructors of beginning design students we share and discuss with them many sources designers can use for creative product inspiration. In discussions among ourselves we became interested in how or if constraints on students' inspiration sources might influence their involvement and motivation in completion of an assigned design project. We wondered what kind of strategies students used to locate their inspiration sources and what inspired them. The purpose of our research was to examine, within context of same design assignment, if students' perceptions about inspiration process varied when assigned a specific source of inspiration or when free to choose a source of inspiration. Specifically, we examined students' perceptions of difficulty of finding inspiration and ideas for their project, time spent in searching for information on their source of inspiration, their perception of difficulty of project and their enjoyment of process, their attitude toward their design project and their preference about being assigned an inspiration source or being free to choose an inspiration source. We collected data from groups of beginning-level design students after they completed their design project, a three dimensional product inspired by a culture. We compared two groups of students' inspiration process in order to better understand their process and to develop effective ways for teaching design. Literature Review The design process is a series of steps or stages that a designer utilizes to solve a design problem or assignment. Finding inspiration comes at an early stage of this process (Aspelund, 2010; Bevlin, 1991; Ellinwood, 2011; McKelvey & Munslow, 2003). Aspelund (2010) described design process as a map from world of imagination to world of objects (p. 5). Watkins (1995) identified design process as a step-by-step problem-solving method that designers use for developing design concepts (p. …