The effect of ambiguous visual stimuli on creativity in design idea generation

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effect of visual stimuli on creativity for generating ideas among designers. A survey with design students was conducted in this investigation to extract visual stimuli from the sub-symbolic domain (vague stimuli), visual stimuli from the symbolic domain (definite stimuli), and visual stimuli between the two domains (ambiguous stimuli). Subsequently, a conceptual combination experiment was conducted using selected stimuli to examine the effects of ambiguous visual stimuli on creativity to generate ideas among designers. The results suggest that in individual working environments, dissimilar concept pairs fostered higher elaboration when ambiguous stimuli were present, whereas similar concept pairs fostered higher elaboration when vague stimuli were presented. It was further suggested that in group working environments, vague stimuli result in higher abstractness when dissimilar concept pairs are used, whereas ambiguous stimuli result in higher abstractness when similar concept pairs were used.

KEYWORDS:

• Ambiguity
• conceptual combination
• idea generation
• design cognition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Creative strength has 13 criterion-referenced measures: emotional expressiveness, storytelling articulateness, movement or action, the expressiveness of titles, the synthesis of incomplete figures, the synthesis of lines or circles, unusual visualization, internal visualization, extending or breaking boundaries, humor, the richness of imagery, colorfulness of imagery, and fantasy.

2. The Battig and Montague Category Norms categorize nouns as follows: (1) a four-footed animal, (2) a kitchen utensil, (3) a furniture article, (4) a human body part, (5) a fruit, (6) a weapon, (7) a carpenter’s tool, (8) a clothing article, (9) a part of a building, (10) a musical Instrument, (11) a bird, (12) a type of vehicle, (13) a toy, (14) a vegetable, and (15) an insect. The classification of Battig and Montague has been much quoted and used as a standard for concept categorization in research areas such as memory retrieval and cross-cultural categorical memory. We examined and reviewed those 15 noun categories to ensure that the nouns and the categorization system were relevant to our study and appropriate for design projects. As a result, 13 noun categories were used (a weapon and a bird were excluded).

3. Two independent variables (similarity and ambiguity) used in the experiment were classified as two types (same category and different category) and three types (vague, ambiguous, and definite stimuli), respectively, with different values of four MANOVA test criteria which are characterized as follows. Wilk’s lambda, Hotelling’s Trace, and Pillai’s trace pool the variance from all dimensions to create the test statistic. Roy’s largest root only uses the variance from the dimension that separates the groups the most (the largest ‘root’ or difference).

4. Two independent variables (similarity and ambiguity) used in the experiment were classified as two types (same category and different category) and three types (vague, ambiguous, and definite stimuli), respectively, with different values of four MANOVA test criteria which are characterized as follows. Wilk’s lambda, Hotelling’s Trace, and Pillai’s trace pool the variance from all dimensions to create the test statistic. Roy’s largest root only uses the variance from the dimension that separates the groups the most (the largest ‘root’ or difference).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea grant funded by the Korean Government: [Grant Number NRF-2012S1A5A2A01017353].