Browsing by Subject "Stimulated Recall"

The aim of the study was to investigate ideas and idea generation of designers in free improvisation tasks at conceptual level in the experiment, planned primarily for the physiological and neurological measurements. My study was a part of the multidisciplinary research project Handling Mind: Embodiment, Creativity and Design which concentrated on studying relations between mind, body and materials combining the fields of psychology, neuroscience and creativity. The neurological study did not reveal what and how participants felt, thought and experienced during the experiment which was the main interest in my study. Previous research has focused on investigating various fields of the design process, as well as the ideation phase, but investigating idea generation in the context of neuroscientific research is a new and interesting chance for the research. The ideation phase represents an iterative and vibrant nature of the design process. Previous studies have brought out the meaning of available sources of inspiration, and designers' competence to adapt the essential parts of the original sources and transform them into design outputs regarding the aspects of novelty and functionality. Therefore, I developed my research questions concerning ideas and idea development in freely improvising tasks in a new design situation. The 30 participants participated in the study as volunteers from the School of Art, Design and Architecture in Aalto University from November 2014 to March 2015. They performed copying, designing or free improvising tasks by drawing or forming clay. I organized the Stimulated Recall (SR) interviews with my colleague to collect data. We selected the 15 out of 30 interviews to represent the data in our studies. I analyzed the transcript data by qualitative content analysis: the classification scheme was both data and theory driven. The analysis revealed that designers had different ideas emerging from internal stimuli, for example, from their mental library or they were impressed by external stimuli, for instance, material, tools and cup images from the experiment. The experiment represented an external design constraint: it confined the problem space and narrowed down the alternative solutions. Designers had concrete and abstract ideas, but also the abstractions of ideas were developed. They relied on familiar topic choices but also were capable of creating analogies. Even this minimalistic design experiment revealed that designers are able to use their mental sources of inspiration and capable of picking profitable stimuli from their surroundings in new and uncertain situations for adapting and developing ideas further. Designers sought meaning for their sketching and experimenting as well.