Creativity Predictors: Findings From Design-by-Analogy Ideation Methods’ Learning and Performance

There is still much to learn about the mechanisms and interactions by which psychological and cognitive factors influence creative performance in design, and more explicitly in design’s ideation stage. The present study aims to explore such influences for Design by Analogy (DbA) ideation methods. 69 participants from 52 companies in Mexico and Singapore executed two ideation sessions (phase I and phase II) to generate solution ideas for a service design problem (same design problem was used for both phases). Between the two phases participants were assigned and trained with one of three selected ideation conditions: Control, WordTree and SCAMPER. Finally, they were asked to self-evaluate 11 factors that may influence their creative performance. The explored factors comprised individual, performance self-perception and contextual factors. Individual factors are considered with respect to the ideation activity and the design problem. In the case of the ideation activity evaluated factors are: entertainment (boring-fun), motivation, inspiration and easiness (difficult-easy). For the design problem, interest, easiness and inspiration are considered. Performance self-perception factors are: commitment (minimal effort-hard work), concentration (unfocused-focused) and level of success (unsuccessful-successful). Lastly, the Contextual factor considered is the self-perceived relation of time with respect to ideas. Two main analyses are presented and discussed in this article: the effect of learning and applying DbA ideation methods on participants’ factor self-evaluation, and; the relationship between the 11 self-evaluated factors and creative performance using the metrics of Fluency, Novelty and Fixation.