Decoding designers’ inspiration process

Every great invention, innovative design or visionary art piece ever created started in the same way: with a blank canvas. However, you never begin a new project with a completely clean slate: besides memories, past experiences and general knowledge, all of us are constantly surrounded by information, which can have a profound influence in our daily lives. Designers, just like other problem solvers, often find inspiration for their solutions in the myriad of stimuli they encounter. Nevertheless, these random encounters with inspiration are unpredictable. When they are required to consistently deliver creative solutions, designers can become stuck or fixated, unable to continue generating ideas. And because inspiration is not understood as a step-wise process that can be neatly followed by a method, nobody knows whether a stimulus found by chance may lead to an insight and, subsequently, to the development of a novel and practical solution. Although this is a process that designers naturally, and often unconsciously experience in practice, research on design inspiration has not gained much traction so far. This thesis aimed to address that, to better support the inspiration process of designers and thereby promote the development of creative solutions. This thesis is composed by a theoretical and empirical investigation, which culminates in the conclusions chapter, with implications and recommendations for design education and practice. In the theoretical investigation, chapters 1 and 2 introduce the topic of inspiration in design. More specifically, chapter 1 describes the main phenomenon explored in this thesis and the research methodology adopted for each study. Chapter 2 reviews meaningful theoretical streams of literature, relevant for the study of inspiration in design, by including concrete definitions of inspiration in relation to information, inspiration sources and stimuli. The empirical investigation section of this thesis is composed by four studies, ranging from quantitative (such as questionnaire and empirical studies) to qualitative methods (case studies and interviews). Thus, chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 offer a multi-faceted exploration of the inspiration process: whilst chapter 3 (Study I) explores what designers search for, chapter 4 (Study II) investigates the influence of stimuli in design ideation and, finally, chapters 5 and 6 (Studies III and IV) zoom in the inspiration process of designers. The outcome of this thesis is in-depth knowledge on the inspiration process of designers within the field of design creativity. Furthermore, I present a model of designers’ inspiration process, which accounts for the specific steps involved in the use of external stimuli for inspirational purposes in design. These findings contributed to the development of recommendations for design practice and education, which can be used to support designers in their inspiration process to enhance creativity.