Exploring the impact of generative stimuli on the creativity of designers in combinational design

This is the final version. Available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this record. The ideation process has a significant impact on the initial concept generation and final product creativity of the design. Visual stimuli play an important role in the process of innovative product design. With the increase in computing capability, generative design methods are widely implemented. In this paper, features of design targets and combinational objects in 2 combinational design tasks are fused using adversarial neural generative networks to form the generated stimuli. It is also used with combinational object pictures to investigate the impact on creativity in design ideation. The study invited designers to use and subjectively self-evaluate the two stimuli in a design task. Through analysis of participant data (n=20), the results showed that the generative stimuli had an advantage over the combinational image stimuli in terms of the smoothness of creativity in the design ideation of outcomes. And there is a positive correlation between designers' years of design education and their tendency to prefer generative stimuli. Based on the results obtained, ideas are provided for the study of the influence of visual and generative stimuli on the designer's ideation process