Modality and fidelity: Understanding how creative stimulus combinations impact design outcomes and process across different conceptual design phases

During conceptual design, creative stimuli are an external source of inspiration to support students’ ideation process. Although existing research has explored the roles of creative stimuli, they rarely consider the intertwined influence brought by stimuli’s multiple characteristics, and overlook variations in stimuli’s effectiveness at different design phases. To fill this gap, this research conducted a $3\times 3$ experiment, involving 72 design students in a three-phase design process and presenting combinations of textual and visual stimuli at distinct fidelities. We assessed different stimulus combinations’ influence on creativity, and employed behavior coding and linkograph to reveal students’ behavior and cognitive patterns throughout the process. The results revealed the mutual influence between the fidelity of texts and images, and students commonly needed more concrete stimuli in later design phases. Furthermore, students provided with different stimulus combinations exhibited variations in time allocation for behaviors including task analysis, idea generation, and evaluation, and they employed distinct approaches to generate new ideas. These findings highlight the necessity for design educators to dynamically provide creative stimuli based on the design phase, educational objective, and students’ state.