Education, including in design, is at a crossroads with the rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Although its use is exponentially growing, there are concerns that its unreflective use may undermine the development of essential skills. Regarding creativity-specific contexts, its potential to either enhance or constrain cognitive processes and creative confidence remains underexplored. This study investigates ChatGPT’s impact on ideation among User Experience Design students (N = 35), focusing on their cognitive processes, creative confidence and idea creativity. In a within-group experiment, participants generated a total of 214 design concepts under conditions with and without ChatGPT. Data collected included pre-experiment self-report of ChatGPT usage, creative confidence measures, artifacts (sketches, collages, mind maps), experts’ assessment of creativity and post-experiment self-report on creative confidence, ideas and ideation process, along with interviews. Findings indicate that while ChatGPT enhanced convenience and speed, it was associated with dampened cognitive engagement, which may result in an increased reliance on the tool and possible decreased creative confidence, potentially triggering a cycle of dependency and reduced self-efficacy, warranting further longitudinal investigation. We finalize this article with recommendations for design education to integrate metacognitive training and encourage critical evaluation of AI use, thereby empowering novice designers as active, reflective creative thinkers.

Various methods are offered to measure design creativity. Nonetheless, a debate continues over the development of a trustworthy and objective method to mitigate the influences on the evaluation. Therefore, we propose and develop a novel tool and approach for evaluating design creativity, which reframes creativity evaluation as a structured and data-driven process. This tool represents a significant advancement in the evaluation of design creativity by mitigating objective factors. Importantly, our tool enables researchers and educators to adopt it freely and objectively for evaluation.

The relationship between culture and creativity has sparked the interest of researchers for decades. Although researchers have attempted to establish a connection between culture and creativity, the precise relationship between the two remains ambiguous. The current paper examined extant literature on the subject matter and synthesized the relations between culture and creativity in ideation over the past twenty years. The present study expounds upon the utilized samples, measures implemented to assess creativity and culture, and the study results.

Previous studies have clearly established the impact of culture on design creativity. For example, the presence of cultural values with low uncertainty avoidance (UA, the degree of anxiety and risk aversion that people feel during ambiguous situations) is linked to low workability of creative ideas. Currently, there is limited research on potential remedies to alleviate the impact of culture, specifically with respect to UA. Therefore, this study investigates the use of technology to prime UA cultural values and mitigate their potential negative impacts on design creativity. This was achieved using stimuli that had been generated by virtual reality (VR) technology and presented in an immersive environment. Participants in an experimental study were exposed to VR stimuli designed to either decrease or increase their UA. The results showed that the VR stimuli had successfully increased and decreased low and high UA values, respectively, which mitigated the influence of UA on design creativity. Furthermore, the VR stimuli influenced the emphasis of the participants on ideation, with lowered and enhanced UA values leading to them prioritizing novelty and usefulness, respectively. Overall, the findings provided evidence that VR could be leveraged from a psychological standpoint to reduce cultural influences on creativity through targeted priming. These findings indicated the essential implications of the study in terms of understanding the effect of immersive technologies in shaping human behaviors and mindsets.

Extensive research has focused on the influence of culture on individuals’ performance in design, with either positive or negative effects. Moreover, studies have shown that it is possible to prime individuals’ cultural values to influence their behaviours in design. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has explored priming culture in design, especially with digital stimuli. Therefore, we conducted a pilot study to explore the influence of priming culture by digital stimuli in design. First, we created video-based digital stimuli to prime individuals’ individualism versus collectivism (IC) cultural values. We tested the digital stimuli in an ideation exercise during a creative design course that aimed to explore and implement essential creative problem-solving and design thinking methodologies in practice for students. The results showed that the collectivism digital stimulus increased the participants’ IC value. However, in the other two conditions, the participants’ IC values also increased, which was unexpected. Therefore, we discussed the role that enjoyable group ideation plays in participants’ IC values. Furthermore, we found that their design aim changes by priming IC values. These findings can support the development of educational practices aimed at encouraging design novices in teams independently of their culture and inspire researchers to further explore the influence of priming culture in design.

Designers often face situations where the only way forward is through the exploration of possibilities. However, there is a critical disconnect between understanding of how designer's think and act in such situations. We address this disconnect by proposing and testing (via protocol analysis) the cognitive co-evolution model. Our model comprises a new approach to co-evolutionary design theory by explaining both the progression of the process itself and the creation of design outputs via an interplay between metacognitive perceived uncertainty, cognition, and the external world. We thus connect explanations of how designers think with descriptions of how they act. We provide a foundation for connecting to other theories, models, and questions in design research via common links to cognition and metacognition.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest among researchers in the field of virtual reality (VR) storytelling. There is a lack of studies on using VR storytelling to prime culture-related content. The cultural aspects, particularly the tendency to avoid uncertainty, have yet to be thoroughly examined within VR. Therefore, we developed VR storytelling intending to prime individuals’ uncertainty avoidance values. An experiment was conducted to assess the efficacy of VR storytelling in priming individuals’ uncertainty avoidance values. The participants’ encounter with VR storytelling was assessed through various parameters, including but not limited to their experience of presence and engagement in the virtual environment. The study provides evidence that VR storytelling has the capacity to influence individuals’ cultural values, particularly their inclination to uncertainty avoidance. Furthermore, the feedback provided by the participants revealed that they had positive emotions, a feeling of being present, engagement, and immersion while engaging with such VR storytelling.

We investigate reverging - the phase between the diverging and converging steps in a creative process - in the context of a visual thinking agency. Creative facilitation literature advocates for such a phase, aimed at revisiting and rearranging ideas generated during diverging, to prepare for converging. However, in practice this step is often neglected or not performed well, resulting into a sense of increased complexity or lack of client ownership. Two studies were used to investigate reverging in context: a preliminary study consisted of interviews and observations to better understand reverging in current visual thinking practices. The follow-up study focused on co-creating a tool to solve the problem identified in the preliminary study. While the preliminary study revealed the need to involve clients in both diverging and reverging phases, the follow-up study resulted in the creation of the Whiteboard Canvas. The tool was tested in practice and several benefits of reverging in visual thinking practices emerged. The tool empowers visual thinking practitioners to involve their clients more actively in reverging, resulting into a more deliberate creative process and an increased sense of client ownership.

In today’s world, the advantages of data-enabled design are undeniable, increasing the performance of organisations drastically by informing and inspiring the design process. While organisations seem to be more experienced with quantitative data for evaluative purposes, they do struggle to use data as creative material to inspire the design process. Choosing the right type of data representation is critical for using data for creative purposes. Data visualization has proven to be highly effective in increasing understanding of data, as it is fast, accurate and flexible. Data physicalization, on the other hand, remains unexplored in comparison, especially its effect on creativity. This paper presents the results of two studies (one preliminary and one follow-up study), which explored the use of data physicalization in creative settings. The preliminary study enabled to collect initial requirements for the development of a physicalization toolkit, while the follow-up study investigated its impact on the design process, in comparison to data visualization. From the studies, we developed Concreate, a collaborative data physicalization toolkit designed to lead to creative insights from quantitative data. Our results show that Concreate can potentially stimulate creative thinking, by encouraging intense, tangible interaction with data leading to increased reflection-in-action and a deeper understanding of data. The two studies and toolkit development were carried out at a multinational automotive company, interested in innovating by incorporating data as creative material. Besides the immediate practical implications, we conclude this paper with a discussion on future recommendations for using data physicalization in the design process.

Ideation is simultaneously one of the most investigated and most intriguing aspects of design. The reasons for this attention are partly due to its importance in design and innovation, and partly due to an array of conflicting results and explanations. In this study, we develop an integrative perspective on individual ideation by combining cognitive and process-based views via dual-process theory. We present a protocol and network analysis of 31 ideation sessions, based on novice designers working individually, revealing the emergence of eight idea archetypes and a number of process features. Based on this, we propose the Dual-Process Ideation (DPI) Model, which links idea creation and idea judgement. This explains a number of previously contradictory results and offers testable predictive power.