Creative Exploration through Idea Sketches in the Product Design Process: A Case of the Designers Highly Skilled in Digital Technologies

Abstract

For developing the creativity support system, to understand human creative activity is crucial. In the field of product design, current designers aimed at creating novel user experiences have been recently prevalent for designers to generate ideas rather than determine user needs. Therefore, dialogues between the designers and users tend to be valued in gathering user requirements. This research aims to investigate the designer's exploration by interpretation of idea sketches by reflection. Three cases are discussed: the designer tried to create awareness on how designers can understand the users' real requirements through dialogue, to find inexplicit requirements of the users, and to generate the images from the users' denial comments. To investigate idea generation processes, a designer investigated their own sketches and determined key points of detecting the users' real requirements. This paper also discusses the influence of digital design technologies from the perspective of creativity.