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Investigating the Roles of Expertise and Modality in Designers’ Search for Inspirational Stimuli


 Designers can benefit from inspirational stimuli when presented during the design process. Encountering external stimuli can also lead designers to negative design outcomes by limiting exploration of the design space and idea generation. Prior work has investigated how specific features of inspirational stimuli can be beneficial or harmful to designers. However, the processes designers use to search for and discover inspirational stimuli leading to these outcomes are less known. The objective of this work is thus to better understand how designers search for inspirational design stimuli. Specifically, we investigate how factors such as designer expertise and search modality (e.g., text vs. visual-based) impact both explicit and implicit features during the search for design stimuli. A cognitive study was completed by novice and expert designers (seven students and eight professionals), who searched for design stimuli using a novel multi-modal search platform while following a think-aloud protocol. The multi-modal search platform enabled search using text and nontext inputs, and provided design stimuli in the form of 3D-model parts. This work presents methods to describe search processes in terms of three levels: activities, behaviors, and pathways, as defined in this paper. Our findings determine that design expertise and search modality influence search behavior. Illustrative examples are presented and discussed of search processes leading designers to both negative and beneficial outcomes, such as designers fixating on specific results or benefiting unexpectedly from unintentional inspirational stimuli. Overall, this work contributes to an improved understanding of how designers search for inspiration, and key factors influencing these behaviors.