Abstract
Design activity can be supported using inspirational stimuli (e.g., analogies, patents, etc.), by helping designers overcome impasses or in generating solutions with more positive characteristics during ideation. Design researchers typically generate inspirational stimuli a priori in order to investigate their impact. However, for a chosen stimulus to possess maximal utility, it should automatically reflect the current and ongoing progress of the designer. In this work, designers receive computationally selected inspirational stimuli midway through an ideation session in response to the state of their current solution. Sourced from a broad database of related example solutions, the semantic similarity between the content of the current design and concepts within the database determine which potential stimulus is received. Designers receive a particular stimulus based on three experimental conditions: a semantically near stimulus, a semantically far stimulus, or no stimulus (control). Results indicate that adaptive inspirational stimuli can be determined using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and that semantic similarity measures are a promising approach for real-time monitoring of the design process. The ability to achieve differentiable near vs. far stimuli was validated using both semantic cosine similarity values and participant self-response ratings. As a further contribution, this work also explores the impact of different types of adaptive inspirational stimuli on design outcomes. Here, near inspirational stimuli increase the feasibility of design solutions. Results also demonstrate the significant impact of the overall inspirational stimulus innovativeness on final design outcomes, which may be greater than differences across individual sub-dimensions.
