The Effect of Image Stimulus on Conceptual Combination in the Design Idea Generation Process

In our experiences of teaching design students and working with design professionals, we have often observed the great importance of inspiration even if students and professionals approach design in various ways. Moreover, we often find that presenting a designer with stimuli at the initial stages of a design inspires the generation of new ideas. This paper aims to discover the relationship between the similarity of visual stimuli and the creativity generated by visual stimuli in the conceptual synthesizing process. This represents the most frequently employed design idea generation technique.The results showed that the concept pairs from different categories had a lower level of similarity than the concept pairs from the same category. In regards to the creativity of the design idea sketches, the concept pairs from different categories obtained higher creativity scores than the concept pairs in the same category. However, there was no significant correlation between similarity and creativity, and the mode of representation of the concept pairs did not affect their perceived level of similarity. However, visual stimuli fostered more creativity than textual stimuli for concept pairs in different categories.In summary, the results of the study suggested an effective way to promote design idea generation and fostering creativity by presenting similar concept images selected from different categories.