Searching for Inspiration: an In-depth Look at Designers Example Finding Practices

Designers frequently use examples during the design process as a way to provide a visual framework, allow for reinterpretation and allow for evaluation of design ideas. Although the use of examples is an important part of the design process, little is known about how designers retrieve these examples or the characteristics of the example set designers collect for a given project. Knowledge of this behavior is important, as research has shown that using examples too similar to the design problem or too familiar to the designer can cause design fixation and hinder creativity. Therefore, the current study was conducted to provide insights into these example retrieval processes by monitoring 18 professional designers during a 90-minute design task complemented by surveys and interviews for an in-depth understanding of user behavior. We relate our results to research on design fixation and provide implications for the development of example finding tools. INTRODUCTION Designers rarely start designing from scratch, but instead transform, combine or adapt elements of existing designs (examples) in order to generate new ideas [1, 2]. In this paper, we use the word example to mean any material, product, prototype or digital artifact that contributes directly or indirectly to a design. This could be a sketch, a photo, a webpage or any item that inspires creative thought [3]. Examples are seen as the cornerstone of the creative process and designers often search for these examples in the early phases of design in order to gain inspiration for new design ideas [4-6]. Because it is common for designers to be inspired by and reuse structures, aesthetics, and functions of existing designs in their own design ideas, the quality of their ideas hinges on the quality of the examples they select. For instance, if designers view high quality or highly innovative examples, the components they are inspired by or reuse will likely be more high quality and innovative. On the contrary, if they select examples that are typical of the domain in which they are designing (not innovative), the ideas they develop will likely be less innovative. Therefore, the types of examples designers select for a given design task can have a large impact on the types of the ideas developed. The selection of design examples is of vital importance in design given peripheral research in the area of design fixation which has shown that design examples can cause designers to prematurely commit to a limited set of ideas [7]. Design fixation has been exhaustively studied in both engineering (see for example [8-12]) and psychology (see for example [2, 1320]). Although these studies provide a theoretical understanding of design fixation, the participants in these studies used experimenter provided examples during their design session and thus the studies only explored how well participants were able to leverage carefully selected example sets. While these studies provide a foundation for research in this space, it leaves the question if designers actually retrieve ‘fixating’ examples in practice and, if so, what methods or technologies can be developed to mitigate this fixation effect. Thus, the current study was developed to understand how designers retrieve examples from the Web and if the examples collected are considered ‘fixating’. In order to answer these questions, a 90-minute design session and a follow-up semistructured interview with 18 professional designers (industrial, graphic and web) was conducted. The results from this study shed light on the strategies designers use to retrieve examples and the potential fixation effects that may arise. RELATED WORK While not studied in the context of design example retrieval, there has been substantial research in the areas of example selection, example repositories and Web search that provide a basis for this research. This section is meant to