Variances in the impact of visual stimuli on design problem solving performance

Gabriela Goldschmidt and Maria Smolkov, Faculty of Architecture & Town Planning, Technion e Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel Research in cognitive psychology and in design thinking has shown that the generation of inner representations in imagery and external representations via sketching are instrumental in design problem solving. In this paper we focus on another facet of visual representation in design: the consumption of external visual representations, regarded as stimuli, when those are present in the designers work environment. An empirical study revealed that the presence of visual stimuli of dierent kinds can aect performance, measured in terms of practicality, originality and creativity scores attained by designs developed by subjects under dierent conditions. The ndings suggest that the eect of stimuli is contingent on the type of the design problem that is being solved. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved Keywords: creativity, design problems, problem solving, visual stimuli

Corresponding author: G. Goldschmidt [email protected]

esigners in all disciplines live in a very visual world. They are sensitive to the appearance of artifacts and environments, as a matter of course. Needless to say, the visual qualities of their design products are, with practically no exception, of great importance to them (as well as to clients and users). Therefore, it is not surprising that visual information is prominent in the design process. We often say that designers think visually, by which we mean that representations that serve designers to think with are not only verbal but largely consist of shapes and forms. There is a debate concerning the mode of such representations: are inner representations, using imagery, the prime generator of visual thinking in designing, or are external representations, in the form of drawings of all sorts and other two- and three-dimensional representations, indispensable to design thinking? Fish (2003) proposed that humans were endowed with mental imagery to survive as hunters in prehistoric times, but evolution has not yet adapted this capacity to deal with complex inventive processes such as are required in designing.
www.elsevier.com/locate/destud 0142-694X $ - see front matter Design Studies 27 (2006) 549e569 doi:10.1016/j.destud.2006.01.002 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain

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Therefore, external representation is benecial as a means of representational amplication. Most of the research pertaining to representational issues has not yet addressed typical complex design problems of the kind designers handle routinely. An exception is research into the activity of sketching in designing which continues to be the subject of detailed investigations, among others because of the importance of the understanding of the role of sketching in designing to the development of computational support tools for design (e.g., Akin and Moustapha, 2004). In this paper we focus on visual stimuli and the eect they have on design performance. Visual stimuli include displays in the designers work environment and they may take various shapes, including sketches produced by the designer him/herself, for whatever purpose. It is not the activity of sketching that we study here, though, but the presence of visuals to which the designer has immediate access. We know that environmental factors have an impact on people in general and even random encounters with external stimuli might direct problem solving in a particular direction (Seifert et al., 1995). McCoy and Evans (2002) found that in an environment perceived as high in creative potential people get higher scores in at least some creativity tests than in environments that are seen as low in creative potential (in other tests no dierence was registered). The environmental factor that was seen as having the greatest impact on creative potential was complexity and visual detail. Malaga (2000) reported an experiment in which participants were asked to generate ideas in response to a specic task, having been shown word, picture, and combined word and picture stimuli. The use of picture stimuli elicited more creative ideas than word or combined stimuli. Nevertheless, we found it dicult to predict the impact that specic visual stimuli may have on design performance and in particular, on the solving of dierentiated design problems (e.g., problems with a heavy technological focus versus low-tech problems with an ecological, or emotional, emphasis). Therefore, we set out to conduct an explorative experiment with the general hypotheses that visual stimuli do indeed have a bearing on designers performance, and that this inuence is dissimilar for dierent types of design problems. Following a brief survey of the literature we consider most relevant, we report the experiment and its results, and discuss what we learned from it.

Mental synthesis and beyond

In the 1980s, Finke and his associates (e.g., Finke, 1990) pioneered a research agenda whose subject matter came to be known as mental synthesis. The purpose of these investigations was to establish how

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powerful mental imagery is in manipulating forms and acting on them. In a series of inuential studies Finke showed his subjects a set of 15 labeled forms, half of which were geometric (e.g., sphere, cone) and the other half simple objects (e.g., hook, bracket). After the subject had memorized them, the forms were removed. The subject was then blindfolded and given the labels of three of the initial forms, randomly selected. He or she was asked to combine the three elements whose names were called out into a useful object that belongs to a given category (e.g., toy, household item). The time allotted was 2 min. After those 2 min, the subject was asked to name the object or objects (if there were more than one) into which he or she synthesized the three forms, and then draw it, or them, on paper. The great majority of subjects e all psychology students e were able to come up with at least one such synthesized object. The drawings were then scored by na ve judges for practicality and for originality; combinations of scores beyond a certain threshold were considered creative. The experiments were repeated several times with slight variations and Finke concluded that imagery is a strong cognitive resource that people can use for inventive thinking. He called the creative objects that his subjects came up with preinventions (Finke, 1990).

1.1

Sketching

Finkes experiments were repeated, with variations, by other researchers who were also interested in related topics that Finke had left out of his agenda. Anderson and Helstrup (1993), who like Finke used psychology students as subjects, designed an experiment in which a control group was not blindfolded but, on the contrary, was allowed to use paper and pencil and sketch during the 2 min in which they were to synthesize useful objects. When comparing the creativity scores of the subjects, no signicant dierences were found between the blindfolded subjects and those who were allowed to sketch. Logie and his associates who conducted similar experiments came to similar conclusions, but qualied them to subjects with no prior sketching experience (e.g., Pearson et al., 1999). Verstijnen, who hypothesized that sketching must be of some benet to those who practice it routinely, like designers, repeated the experiment. She used only geometric forms (and a smaller set of them) and in addition to having blindfolded subjects and open-eyed sketchers, she also had two categories of subjects by background: psychology students and industrial design students (with a minimum of two drawing courses). The dierence between them was the amount of experience they had in employing sketching to solve problems: design students had such experience whereas psychology students did not. The ndings showed clearly that at least for some classes of preinventions,

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sketching results in more creative solutions provided the subject is an experienced sketcher, in this case an advanced design student (Verstijnen et al., 1998). Design researchers followed the mental synthesis literature with great interest, but made the point that synthesizing three elements into a useful object in 2 min does not qualify as designing. Athavankar and his associates (e.g., Athavankar, 1996; Athavankar and Mukherjee, 2003) carried out several experiments in which designers and design students were asked to undertake design assignments while blindfolded, a typical design session lasting 1e2 h. The subjects talked out loud during the process and drew the resultant designs at the end of the session. Athavankar concluded that complex designs can be generated using mental imagery as the only medium of visual representation. Kokotovich and Purcell (2000) went back to mental synthesis experiments, but used two separate sets of stimuli: two-dimensional shapes and three-dimensional forms (Finke and his associates had carried out mental synthesis experiments with two-dimensional shapes before they moved on to three-dimensional forms; see for example Finke and Slayton, 1988). Their subjects included graphic design and industrial design students, and law students as a control group. They were able to show that both designer groups performed better than the non-designers (law students), but each of the designer groups scored higher in problems typical to its domain. That is, graphic design students did better in two-dimensional problems and industrial designers achieved higher scores in three-dimensional problems. In these experiments sketching had no eect on creativity scores. Suwa and Tversky used retrospective reports (replication protocol analysis) to study how designers utilize their own sketches and how such sketches help crystallize design ideas and concepts (e.g., Suwa and Tversky, 1997, 2001). This work follows in the footsteps of Goldschmidt (1991), and Scho n and Wiggins (1992), who explained the robustness of sketching activities among designers (architects, for the most part) by describing design as a conversation, or dialogue the designer holds with him/herself and the materials of the situation. In such a conversation the sketches serve as representations o which rich information is read that is not readily accessible otherwise.

1.2

Rich displays as stimuli

If designers are able to read useful information o their vague and incomplete conceptual sketches, they are likely to read information o other representations as well, even if such representations are not so intimately related to the problem they are wrestling with. Designers

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have always been inclined to surround themselves with rich displays and in fashion design, for example, the use of sources of inspiration has been formalized (Johnson et al., 1999; Eckert and Stacey, 2000). However, such sources are carefully picked, and are usually within-domain references. Casakin asked whether stimuli in the form of collections of pictures, some within-domain and some not, have any eect on designers problem solving. In his experiments subjects (architects and architecture students) solved ill-dened and well-dened design problems in a room in which some two-dozen black-and-white drawings and photographs were pinned to a large board. A control group solved the same problems in a bare space (same room). The scores assigned to the resultant designs by na ve judges showed that subjects who worked with displays outperformed their peers who worked in a bare space in solving ill-dened problems. For well-dened problems, however, only experienced designers beneted from the displays (Casakin and Goldschmidt, 2000).1 This result is relevant to our present study because it suggests that designers exhibit opportunistic behavior in that they take advantage of anything in the work environment that may potentially trigger ideas or lead to an enhanced memory scan, motivated by a cue that suggests itself as useful. The cuing channel appears to be visual, i.e. visual displays become stimuli. This is consistent with McCoy and Evans (2002) ndings, described in the introduction. To summarize, research suggests that (a) Designers, like others, can use mental imagery to manipulate shapes and forms and recombine them in meaningful and even creative ways e an activity that is most relevant to designing. (b) Sketching is useful (i.e., leads to more creative results) to those who due to experience are procient users of sketching in design problem solving, in certain types of spatial manipulations of simple forms. It is postulated that the advantage results from the self-generated sketches becoming displays that are particularly rich in useful cues. (c) Domain specic design experience controls performance and qualies the benet from sketching in problem solving. (d) Visual displays in the work environment act as stimuli and possibly as prompts in design problem solving. We are now ready to ask the next question in this line of inquiry: are different kinds of visuals equally eective in enhancing designing in all problem types? We already have evidence that various types of spatial manipulations in mental synthesis are not equally supported by sketching (Verstijnen et al., 1998), and that prior sketching experience can be meaningful to certain types of spatial manipulation. When it comes to designing, do dierent problems require dierent types of cognitive

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resources and, therefore, is performance in terms of parameters of creativity aected by visual stimuli, and how?

Design problems

If prior drawing training and experience modulates the benets a designer is able to draw from the use of sketching (Verstijnen et al., 1998), and if visual displays improve design problem solving for illdened, but not necessarily for well-dened problems (Casakin and Goldschmidt, 2000), then we may conclude that many factors may have an impact on preferred cognitive behavior in designing. A factor that has hitherto not been investigated is the types of design problem that are being solved (beyond ill- or well-dened) and the visual design support systems that could be helpful in solving them. In this paper we consider only the eect of visual displays on parameters of creativity of design solutions. No relevant literature on dierences among design problems was found, but based on the research ndings that many factors may have an impact on design behavior and conditions that support problem solving, we hypothesized that design problems of dierent types show partiality toward dierent kinds of visual displays as support systems. However, we were not able to predict which displays would benet the solving of what design problems. Therefore, our research question is: how do dierent kinds of visual displays aect the solving of dissimilar design problems? We set out to investigate the question empirically. Section 3 describes the experiment that was carried out toward this end.

The experiment

At the outset, the question we posed was: what is the role of sketching and visual displays in design problem solving? An experiment was planned to partially answer this question, in which students of architecture and industrial design were asked to solve (at a preliminary level) two dierent design problems (see Section 3.2), under dierent conditions. The variability in conditions included the use of sketching during the process versus the use of mental imagery alone, with a nal descriptive sketch of the solution (similar to mental synthesis experiments), and work with or without visual displays of one of two types, as described below. In this paper we address the dierences in the judged performance of subjects as a function of the type of design problem they solved, which emerged as one of the most interesting topics raised in this research project. The following is a report of the experimental setup.

3.1

Setting

All of the experimental sessions were conducted in an enclosed, windowless area within a larger space. Subjects were tested individually by an

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experimenter who dispensed problems to the subjects and explained the procedure, but did not intervene in what the subjects did. Subjects were asked to talk out loud and sessions were videotaped with a single camera pointed at the desk surface on which the subjects worked. Before the rst experimental task was presented, a brief training problem was given, the purpose of which was to accustom subjects to talking out loud. Following each session a short debrieng interview was conducted, in which the subject was asked to articulate his or her diculties, if any, during the session, feelings regarding the experiment, and a subjective view on the eect of having made sketches or being prevented from sketching. All graphic output by the subjects was collected and coded for subject identity and experimental condition.

3.2

Tasks

Each subject was asked to solve two design problems, at a xed order. For each problem 20 min were allotted to the development of ideas, and 5 min were dedicated to the execution of the nal version of the solution in the form of a sketch.

3.2.1

Task 1 e chocolate packaging

This task stressed aesthetics, emotional appeal, and innovation. Subjects were asked to design packaging for fancy chocolate candies, sold by the unit. The individual candy is round, 2 cm in diameter, and wrapped in foil. The packaging must accommodate any desired number of candies between three and 50. Figure 1 shows three of the solutions to this problem.

3.2.2

Task 2 e drinking fountain

This task emphasized functionality, practicality, and human factors. Subjects were asked to design a drinking fountain for a picnic area in a public park. Subjects were requested to take into account the dierent heights of adults and children who use the fountain, and to make sure that excess water is collected and not spilled around the fountain. The drawings in Figure 2 are examples of solutions to this problem.

3.3

Subjects

Thirty-six subjects, 20 males and 16 females aged 21e26 participated in the experiment, all students in a Faculty of Architecture. Twenty were architecture students in their fourth or fth year of undergraduate studies and 16 were industrial design students pursuing a Masters degree. Of those, ve had an undergraduate degree in industrial design and 11 had undergraduate degrees in other elds. All had at least three design studios to their credit.

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Figure 1 Design solutions, chocolate packaging task:

(a) with rich stimuli; (b) with sketches as stimuli; (c) with no stimuli

3.4

Experimental conditions

Subjects were divided into three groups, comprising 12 (architecture and industrial design) subjects each. Each group worked under dierent conditions as far as the displays (stimuli) to which they were exposed are concerned. We therefore distinguish among the groups in terms of stimuli. Half the subjects in each group (six subjects) were asked to sketch while designing, for which end they were given white A4 sheets of paper and pencils (black and color). The other half (six subjects) were asked to carry out design operations in their heads and sketch the solution only at the end of each task. Group 1 worked with no specic visual stimuli, with the exception of the functional furniture used during the experiment (desk, two chairs e for the subject and the experimenter), and three bare cardboard panels, 100 200 cm each, positioned vertically against the walls, as depicted in Figure 3. Group 2 worked with diverse, rich, visual stimuli. The three cardboard panels that were in the space were covered with a large number

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Figure 2 Design solutions, drinking fountain task: (a) with rich visual stimuli; (b) with sketches as stimuli; (c) with no stimuli

of pictures and drawings of various kinds (color and black and white), drawn from a host of elds (e.g., product design, art, morphology, nature). In addition a variety of three-dimensional objects were placed on the desk and around it (e.g., architectural models, cardboard polyhedra, and wooden blocks). Figure 4 shows this environment.

Group 3 worked with a modest number of visual stimuli, in the form of photocopies of sketches pinned to the cardboard panels. The sketches in question were made by group 1 and group 2 subjects who had participated in the experiment earlier. Sketches were selected for display on the basis of their clarity and provided they were suciently abstract, i.e., they did not contain explicit solutions to the design problems. The sketches were enlarged (150%) to compensate for viewing distance.

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Figure 3 Experimental environment, no stimuli

The number of sketches shown was approximately equal to the average number of sketches produced by subjects (eight sketches per subject). Each subject was shown a dierent set of sketches. The environment under this condition is shown in Figure 5.

3.5

Judges

All design solutions were evaluated by three judges who were blind to the research goals and the experimental conditions. The judges were graduate students in design or architecture toward the end of their studies toward a Masters degree, and who also had professional design experience.

Figure 4 Experimental environment, diverse rich stimuli

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Figure 5 Experimental environment, sketches as stimuli

3.6

Scoring

Each design solution was assessed for originality, practicality, and general quality. Scores were given on a scale of 1e5, where 1 is low and 5 is high. Inter-rater agreement among judges was computed using Pearsons coecient of correlation, as presented in Table 1. Signicant correlation for both tasks was found for originality and practicality, whereas for general quality, the agreement among judges was acceptable for the chocolate packaging task, but not for the drinking fountain. Therefore, the results and analysis that follow regard only originality and practicality.

Table 1 Inter-rater agreement among judges

Task Chocolate packaging

Assessment Originality Practicality General quality Originality Practicality General quality

r (Judges 1 & 2) ) 0.50) ) 0.44) ) 0.52) ) 0.55) ) 0.51) 0.07

r (Judges 2 & 3) ) 0.58) 0.34) ) 0.43) ) 0.56) ) 0.52) 0.18

r (Judges 1 & 3) ) 0.68) ) 0.41) ) 0.53) ) 0.48) ) 0.51) 0.19

Drinking fountain

) ))

Correlation is signicant at the level of 0.05. Correlation is signicant at the level of 0.01.

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4 Results 4.1 Practicality

4.1.1

Practicality of chocolate packaging designs

A two-way analysis of variance yielded no main eect of stimuli conditions (without stimuli, with rich stimuli or with sketches as stimuli) F(2,30) 0.49, p > 0.05; no main eect of sketching conditions (with sketching and without sketching) F(1,30) 0.49, p > 0.05; and no main eect for their interaction F(2,30) 0.13, p > 0.05.

4.1.2

Practicality of drinking fountain designs

A two-way analysis of variance yielded a main eect of stimuli conditions (without stimuli, with rich stimuli or with sketches as stimuli) F(2,30) 4.16, p < 0.05; a main eect of sketching conditions (with sketching and without sketching) F(1,30) 8.29, p < 0.05: and no main eect for their interaction F(2,30) 0.13, p > 0.05. T-tests were used to compare between scores achieved in the two tasks under dierent conditions:  When no visual stimuli were provided, a signicant dierence between practicality scores for the two tasks was found (T(23) 2.11; p < 0.05). In this environment subjects reached higher practicality scores for the drinking fountain than for chocolate packaging.  When rich visual stimuli were provided, no signicant dierence between practicality scores for the two tasks was found (T(23) 0.4; p > 0.05).  When other subjects sketches served as visual stimuli, no signicant dierence between practicality scores for the two tasks was found (T(23) 1.52; p > 0.05). Although signicance was not reached, in
Table 2 Mean practicality scores: chocolate packaging

Scores With sketching condition Without sketching condition Average

Without stimuli (SD) 3.22 (0.5) 2.94 (0.74) 3.08 (0.62)

Rich stimuli (SD) 3.33 (0.51) 3.33 (0.8) 3.33 (0.65)

Sketches as stimuli (SD) 3.44 (0.58) 3.22 (0.98) 3.33 (0.78)

Average (SD) 3.33 (0.51) 3.17 (0.82)

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Table 3 Mean practicality scores: drinking fountain

Score With sketching condition Without sketching condition Average

Without stimuli (SD) 3.67 (0.67) 3.50 (0.41) 3.58 (0.53)

Rich stimuli (SD) 3.67 (0.73) 2.78 (0.34) 3.22 (0.71)

Sketches as stimuli (SD) 3.22 (0.88) 2.44 (0.62) 2.83 (0.83)

Average (SD) 3.52 (0.75) 2.91 (0.63)

this environment subjects reached higher practicality scores for the chocolate packaging than for the drinking fountain.  In the sketching condition, signicantly higher scores were reached than in the non-sketching condition only for the drinking fountain task.

4.2

Originality

Tables 4 and 5 show the mean originality scores assigned by the judges (scale of 1e5) to the nal design proposals for the chocolate packaging and drinking fountain.

4.2.1

Originality of chocolate packaging designs

A two-way analysis of variance yielded a main eect of stimuli conditions (without stimuli, with rich stimuli or with sketches as stimuli) F(2,30) 3.83, p < 0.05; no main eect of sketching conditions (with sketching and without sketching) F(1,30) 0.07, p > 0.05; and no main eect for their interaction F(2,30) 0.20, p > 0.05.

4.2.2

Originality of drinking fountain designs

A two-way analysis of variance yielded a main eect of stimuli conditions (without stimuli, with rich stimuli or with sketches as stimuli) F(2,30) 11.89, p < 0.05; no main eect of sketching conditions (with sketching and without sketching) F(1,30) 0.12, p > 0.05; and no main eect for their interaction F(2,30) 0.13, p > 0.05.
Table 4 Mean originality scores: chocolate packaging

Score With sketching condition Without sketching condition Average

Without stimuli (SD) 2.83 (0.62) 2.50 (0.75) 2.67 (0.68)

Rich stimuli (SD) 3.61 (1.16) 3.67 (0.91) 3.64 (0.99)

Sketches as stimuli (SD) 3.17 (0.81) 3.22 (0.81) 3.19 (0.77)

Average (SD) 3.20 (0.90) 3.13 (0.92)

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Table 5 Mean originality scores: drinking fountain

Score With sketching condition Without sketching condition Average

Without stimuli (SD) 2.17 (0.93) 2.22 (0.86) 2.19 (0.85)

Rich stimuli (SD) 2.89 (1.08) 2.83 (0.78) 2.86 (0.90)

Sketches as stimuli (SD) 3.67 (0.70) 3.94 (0.25) 3.81 (0.52)

Average (SD) 2.91 (1.07) 3.00 (0.97)

T-tests were used to compare between scores achieved in the two tasks under dierent conditions:  When no visual stimuli were provided, no signicant dierence between originality scores for the two tasks was found (T(23) 1.49; p > 0.05).  When rich visual stimuli were provided, no signicant dierence between originality scores for the two tasks was found (T(23) 1.99; p > 0.05). However, a strong tendency e near signicance e toward greater originality in the design of chocolate packaging was found (p < 0.06).  When other subjects sketches served as visual stimuli, a signicant dierence between originality scores for the two tasks was found (T(23) 2.27; p < 0.05). In this environment subjects reached higher originality scores for the drinking fountain than for chocolate packaging design.  No signicant dierence between the sketching and non-sketching conditions was found in both tasks.

4.3

Creativity

Following Finke (1990), creativity was dened as a product of practicality and originality: only solutions that rate high on both practicality and originality are considered creative. In our study a design solution was considered creative if the sum of its practicality scores was at least 11 (out of 15, which is the maximum accumulative practicality score by three judges; see Section 4.1), and the sum of its originality scores was also at least 11 (likewise, out of a maximum of 15; see Section 4.2). A total of nine design solutions were found to be creative: six in the chocolate packaging task (Table 6) and three in the drinking fountain task (Table 7). The proportion of creative outcomes (12.5%) is close to that found by Finke (1990) in his studies. No creative solutions were achieved in the environment in which there were no visual stimuli. When rich visual stimuli were provided, ve designs (out of six) for chocolate packaging and one design (out of three) for a drinking fountain

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Table 6 Number of designs defined as creative: chocolate packaging

Without stimuli With sketching condition Without sketching condition Total 0 0 0

Rich stimuli 2 3 5

Sketches as stimuli 1 0 1

Total 3 3 6

were found to be creative. Where others sketches served as stimuli, one chocolate packaging and two drinking fountain designs were found to be creative. Due to the small number of items no statistical analysis was carried out. However, the ndings strongly suggest that the presence of visual stimuli is positively correlated with the emergence of creativity.

4.4

Sketching eect

For both practicality and originality, no signicant dierence was found between designing with and without sketching, in both the chocolate packaging task and the drinking fountain task, for most conditions. In the drinking fountain task, sketching during designing resulted in higher practicality scores than designing without sketching (T(35) 2.64; p < 0.05). We also found that of the nine design solutions that were considered creative (Section 4.3), six were developed with the use of sketching (three out of six chocolate packaging designs and all three drinking fountain designs).

Discussion

Our results point to a mixed eect of stimuli on parameters of creativity in design problem solving. For the rst task, chocolate packaging, the pattern of results for practicality and originality scores in the dierent environments was more or less consistent e better results were obtained with visual stimuli than without them, although the incremental improvement varied and signicance was achieved only sporadically. For the second task, the design of a drinking fountain, we found contradictory tendencies; whereas visual stimuli dramatically increased originality, they had a negative eect on practicality. We consider this

Table 7 Number of designs defined as creative: drinking fountain

Without stimuli With sketching condition Without sketching condition Total 0 0 0

Rich stimuli 1 0 1

Sketches as stimuli 2 0 2

Total 3 0 3

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result anomalous. The types of stimuli that aected performance were also in disagreement: rich and diverse displays had dierent eects in the two tasks and for the two parameters of practicality and originality. Sketching, which produces self-generated displays, had an eect only on practicality scores in one task, and no eect at all in the other task. In addition, and quite surprisingly, there was no correlation between subjects performance in the two tasks (r 0.03 for practicality; r 0.13 for originality). Several explanations of these results should be considered. First, we must look at the dierences between the two tasks. Both were short sketch problems (i.e., solutions are expected at a rough conceptual level only) and well suited to the subjects level of knowledge and experience, and to the amount of time allotted to the exercises. However, the nature of the problems was dierent, and we can surmise the dierence from the subjects descriptions of the drinking fountain problem as closed, concrete, centering on ergonomics, related to a basic need e drinking, and the chocolate packaging as being open, interesting, exible, experiential and inspiring a feeling of luxury. The judges assessment criteria also stressed dierent priorities. For the drinking fountain, in order of preference: convenience of use, compatibility with the natural environment, and ease of installation and maintenance. For the chocolate packaging: high aesthetic appeal, uniqueness, and ease with which candies can be drawn out of the packaging. As stated in Section 3.2, the drinking fountain task can therefore be seen as mainly utilitarian, with its operational properties considered of the greatest importance. In contrast the chocolate packaging task is seen as aiming primarily at emotional satisfaction and pleasure through its appearance. None of the displays, including subjects sketches, contained any cues that could possibly assist in operational aspects of the drinking fountain and therefore it is not surprising that displays provided little support in this case. Why did scores actually drop with displays? A possible explanation is that attention to the useless e as it turned out e displays, distracted subjects and subtracted from the attention they were able to dedicate to their problem-solving activity. It may also have been costly in terms of the time allocated to solve the problem, which was rather limited; scanning the displays limited it further. Operational considerations were of a much lower priority in the chocolate packaging task, and therefore the lack of cues in the displays was of no consequence. However, some of the images, in both types of displays, seem to have suggested assembly principles that could be used, with or without transformation, in this task. For example, the ower-like candies

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placed in a vase (Figure 1a) could have been inuenced by a picture of individual articial owers in a vase-like receptacle that was displayed when the subject in question was in session. Such a solution must have been seen as original to the judges, who were not exposed to the displays. Therefore, displays in this case were more useful, and diverse rich displays in particular, as they were more complete, coherent and well-executed than the rough, incomplete sketches made by peers that were used as the second type of stimuli. The diverse stimuli contained cues that could be of value to both practicality and originality of chocolate packaging, even if the subjects themselves were not necessarily aware of their eect on them. A match between the emphases in a design task and the visuals that are available as sources of inspiration may therefore be crucial to the eectiveness of the displays in upgrading practicality and originality of designs. It is particularly interesting to note that even accidental features of the environment have occasionally served as stimuli. Figure 2c is a design proposal for the drinking fountain, made in the bare environment depicted in Figure 3 (the design was rejected by its maker, as indicated by the cross that was drawn over it, but we can overlook this rejection here). We notice that the hole in the right-hand side board that encloses the work space has found its way into the design (upper left-hand corner, square hole in a proposed wall). The student explained that this was a peephole that enabled one to see users of the drinking fountain on the other side of the wall. This example stresses the notion that environmental factors can become useful stimuli to the keen eye almost under any circumstances. Second, we would like to address dierences between conditions that contribute to practicality in design, as opposed to those speaking to originality. This is a highly complex matter but it is worthwhile pursuing, because of its far-reaching consequences for the understanding of designing and for design education. Is performance related to practicality and originality equally sensitive to the circumstances of designing? Goldschmidt et al. (1996) have shown that for design problems of the scope we tackle in this paper, novice designers (rst year architecture students) get signicantly higher originality scores when the problems are presented in an open formulation than when closed formulations are used.2 Functionality (similar to practicality in the present research) scores, on the other hand, are not aected by the problem formulation. If the formulation of the problem aects the solution space constructed by the subject under certain conditions, as maintained by Goldschmidt et al. (1996), then other factors may

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also be instrumental in shaping the problem/solution spaces, and visual stimuli make reasonable candidates for such inuential factors. We can calculate the dierence between scores in the most favorable and least favorable conditions, in terms of visual stimuli, for practicality and originality, in both tasks of the present study, using the gures in Tables 2e5. The results are presented in Table 8. With the exception of (the problematic) practicality scores for the drinking fountain task, the least favorable condition is the lack of any visual stimuli and the most favorable condition is the presence of one of the types of stimuli. D is the calculated dierence between the highest and lowest scores, relative to the lowest score (percentage). As Table 8 clearly shows, originality was more aected than practicality by the presence or absence of visual stimuli. This is in line with the nding that problem formulation has an impact on originality, but not on practicality of design solutions (Goldschmidt et al., 1996). Likewise, for both types of scores, the design of the drinking fountain was more sensitive to the presence or absence of visuals than the chocolate packaging. These ndings are compatible with the explanations oered above, regarding the nature of the problem. It seems, then, that for short design problems and a modest amount of design experience, visual stimuli can expand or shrink the problem space in which the designers search for solutions, and primarily for original solutions. What eect similar conditions may have on designers with more experience, who tackle design problems for much longer stretches of time as is often the case in reality, is at this stage an open question, begging for rigorous research. Third, we would like to bring up the eect, or lack thereof, of sketching on the scores obtained in this experiment. Ones own sketches become self-generated displays and as such are expected to harbor cues that the designer, and for the most part only the designer, can benet from (Goldschmidt, 1991; Suwa and Tversky, 1997). There is some evidence that the act of doodling enables very young children to read meaning into fractions of their own scribbles but not those of their peers (AdiJapha et al., 1998), which may support the assumption that sketching is helpful in reading information o displays, even random displays,
Table 8 Score increments as a function of variance in experimental conditions (D/L indicates increase/ decrease with stimuli)

Task Chocolate packaging Drinking fountain

D-Practicality (%) 7.1 26.5

D-Originality (%) 36.3 74.0

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and associating it with items retrieved from memory. We would therefore expect sketching to have a positive eect on the scores in an experiment like ours, at least where no stimuli are provided. We did not nd such an eect e sketching had no signicant enhancing inuence on scores in environments with no visual stimuli. However, we found that sketching did play a role in most of the solutions that were graded as creative. We may therefore postulate that sketching is useful, in skilled hands, in cases where a conceptual breakthrough is made. The designed object in such a case is radically dierent from familiar objects (Christiaans, 1992), which can e so goes the theory e be internally represented and manipulated for the purpose of design. When suciently remote from typical or prototypical designs, external representation, i.e. sketching, is helpful because experimentation and evaluation are crucial. The volume of our data does not allow for an in-depth comparison between the creative and the rest of the solutions, but we postulate that sketching is indeed particularly meaningful where novelty is of the essence, and provided the proposed solution is more complex than is easy for imagery to handle. Lastly, we must point out that certain methodological problems may have aected our results, although we believe that their eect, if any, is marginal. The number of subjects was relatively small, and they were not suciently homogenous in terms of background. The order in which the problems were given out was xed, rather than randomly altered. The number of stimuli was very large in the diverse rich condition and relatively small in the peers sketches condition. It is possible that if these imperfections were eliminated, we would obtain somewhat more clear-cut results.

Conclusions

The research reported in this paper shows that when designers are required to solve ill-structured design problems at a conceptual level and in a short time, the presence of visual stimuli, and their nature, have an eect on qualities of the solutions they arrive at. The eect is dierent for dierent problem types. Design problems with dierent characteristics are sensitive to dierent environmental conditions in terms of visual stimuli that may enhance performance. Creative and innovative thinking, we found, is most sensitive to environments that provide potential cues and harbor analogy-sources or other similes that contribute to high-level design solutions. Design problems are not of a kind, and it seems appropriate to sort them out more than has hitherto been done, and nd the conditions that can potentially foster the most eective design performance.

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Acknowledgments
This paper is based on the second authors Masters thesis, supervised by the rst author. A rst version of the paper was presented in the Third International Conference on Visual and Spatial Reasoning in Design, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 22e24 July 2004, and was published in its proceedings (Goldschmidt and Smolkov, 2004). The writing of the paper was partially supported by a grant to the rst author from the fund for the promotion of research at the Technion, hereby gratefully acknowledged.

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1. The experiment also had a third condition in which subjects were shown displays and asked to try and use them as analogical sources to support their problem solving. This has also enhanced the solving of ill-dened problems, beyond scores obtained due to the mere presence of displays with no instruction to use them. See analysis and conclusions in Goldschmidt (2001). 2. A closed formulation is phrased using a concept (word) that is clearly associated with existing, familiar solutions of similar design problems. An open formulation presents the same design problem, but is phrased so as to avoid concepts related to existing solutions (Goldschmidt et al., 1996, p. 390).

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