A Trial of Analysis Method on the Expansion of Thought in Creative Design : Role of Thematic Relations on Design Process

Abstract

The challenge of creativity research in the field of design is to clarify the nature of the creative thinking process. The aim of this paper is to propose a research methodology to investigate the process of expansion of thought and to identify the factors in this expansion with a focus on the relationship between the expansion of thought and creativity. In this research a set of design experiment is performed and the protocol analysis of Think-aloud method and semi-structured interviews are adopted for data collection. Our methodology includes concept mapping into the metric space during the design process based on the concept dictionary. Further analysis of results for each subject on each task revealed a correlation between expansion of thought and creativity. Also results were analyzed to find specific features related to higher creativity: use of thematic relations was found to be a distinguishing feature.