Investigating effects of oppositely related semantic stimuli on design concept creativity

Abstract

We are motivated to investigate methods to increase creativity in conceptual design since creativity is essential to design success, and no other stage influences final design success as much as conceptual design. Existing work supports that design stimuli may encourage creative concept generation, but does not give details on how to systematically generate stimuli. The established relationship between language and cognition, and the systematic nature of language prompt us to examine its use as design stimuli. Language relationships such as opposition provide a systematic method of generating non-obvious semantic stimuli for design problems. In this paper, we present two experiments, a pen-and-paper and a verbal protocol study, where participants used oppositely related and similarly related word stimuli in conceptual design. We found that designers using oppositely related word stimuli developed more creative concepts. Language analysis revealed how opposite stimuli elicited designer behaviours that may encourage and support creative concept generation. Our empirical results combined with linguistic theory lead us to propose a model explaining the interactions and effects of opposite-stimulus words on concept creativity. This knowledge can be used to facilitate more creative, and ultimately, more successful design.

Keywords:

• language
• creativity
• design stimuli
• concept generation
• engineering design

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for funding support. We would also like to acknowledge the participants and raters who provided their time.