Milene Gonçalves

Delft University of Technology | TU · Department of Product Innovation Managment

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained significant attention as a tool to support creative design, especially during the ideation phase. Although AI's role in design has been explored, its effectiveness in enhancing design creativity during idea generation remains uncertain. This study investigates how generative AI can influence design creativity...

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 relation...

The role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in design is clearly growing. One of the tenets of the paper is that stimulation could be among the design processes mostly benefitting from the introduction of AI. Available contributions have been reviewed to understand the current support AI can give in design inspiration and ideation. We also reflected o...

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 s...

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...

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 negl...

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...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21650349.2022.2021480

Social innovations are promising to tackle today's complex global challenges, especially when they scale, leading to a higher impact, which can generate a societal transformation. The current work elaborates on scaling deep, a specific scaling strategy aiming to shift cultural values, mindsets and beliefs. However, applying this strategy in practic...

With the advance of the Internet and the Internet of Things, an abundance of 'big' data becomes available. Data science can be incorporated in design, which brings forward various opportunities for designers to benefit from this new material. However, the designer's perspective and their role remains unclear. How do they think about and approach da...

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 cognitiv...

In keeping with the participatory turn, the current work discusses how a double-layered design approach can bring participatory design principles to the policy domain, illustrated by our experiences in a design project for the municipality of Delft, the Netherlands. More precisely, the approach described is double layered in nature, comprising of t...

A design rationale is a representation of the reasoning behind a design concept, explaining why the solution is designed the way it is. This makes design rationale a critical part of concept development. However, there is little exploration on how to build a design rationale. This study sheds light on professional designers’ reasoning in conceptual...

This paper explores the use of visual storytelling, for instance sketching, in organisational strategy practices. It contributes to an understanding of how design education has to change in order to broaden the skillset of design students, for them to be able to redesign organisations.

In this paper on designing organizational processes, we combine insight on reflection-inaction with the role of reflection and experimenting from the organizational routine dynamics literature. Illustrated through a case at a strategy consultancy, we show how a prototyped workshop can elicit reflection-inaction when designing organizational process...

In their early years of education, design students may experience difficulties in reframing design problems. Since reframing is linked to creativity, this may be problematic. While there are some models available to describe the reframing process, it is yet unclear how they are supporting design students. This study concerned the development and te...

The problems of today are increasingly complex in nature. Yet, most support provided by design agencies and innovation consultancies is based on unstructured approaches, guided by the facilitators own intuition. This article presents the Teckel canvas, an approach to guide problem reframing in facilitation to both tackle solution and problem unders...

Multidisciplinary agile teams working in fast paced, delivery-oriented sprint cycles of two weeks can experience moments of stuckness. Typically, these moments can be characterised by the inability to continue, which can be quite detrimental in agile settings, where time is pressured. This paper aims to explore these moments of stuckness, to unders...

Framing is a crucial skill for connecting problem and solution spaces in the creative design process, both for individuals and teams. Frames are implicit in individuals’ cognitive thinking, but the creation of shared frames plays a vital role in collaborative design. Many studies have attempted to describe the framing process, but little is still k...

The goal of this paper is to examine meaning as a component of creativity. We take a demand-based approach for conceptualizing meaning, and propose that it emerges from user needs instead of emerging from already existing creative solutions. Meaning is proposed as a third component of creativity, alongside novelty and usefulness. We test this propo...

Our aim was to understand the relationship between stimuli and inspiration among design team members during the co-evolution of problem and solution in the ideation phase of the design process. Case studies with follow-up interviews were conducted with two multidisciplinary student design teams. The results show that there is a clear relation betwe...

Creativity is quintessential in design ideation, as it fuels innovation in an ever-changing world. However, designers often experience states of being stuck and fixated, either on their own solutions, on examples or on the design process. A think-aloud protocol study and interviews were conducted with 31 novice designers in order to capture their s...

Core elements of design work include the development of problem/solution understanding, as well as information and knowledge sharing activities. However, their interrelationships have been little explored. As such, this work aims to take the first steps towards a more integrated evaluation and description of the interaction between understanding an...

Building on the assumption that the physical environment can have an influence on the creativity of designers and design students in particular, the aim of this paper is to provide theoretical propositions and evidences for this relationship. We develop various propositions about the influence of physical environments on creativity, based on eight...

Building on the assumption that the physical environment can have an influence on the creativity of designers and design students in particular, the aim of this paper is to provide theoretical propositions and evidences for this relationship. We develop various propositions about the influence of physical environments on creativity, based on eight...

Inspiration is a widely recognized phenomenon in everyday life. However, researchers still know very little about what the process of inspiration entails. This paper investigates designers’ approaches when selecting inspirational stimuli during the initial phases of a design process. We conducted a think-aloud protocol study and interviews with 31...

Designers, just like other problem solvers, often find inspiration for their solutions in the myriad of stimuli they encounter every day. Nevertheless, these random encounters with inspiration are unpredictable. When they are required to consistently deliver creative solutions, designers can become stuck or fixated, unable to continue generating id...

Past studies have intermittently shown evidence of incubation effects. In the design field, incubation can occur when designers step away from a problem but continue to think about it unconsciously. However, little is known about which kind of activities should designers engage to prompt creative results. The purpose of this research is to investig...

When engaging in new and ill-defined problems, designers are challenged with many ambiguous moments, such as finding how to start. This is particularly the case with novice designers. Thus, for designers, selecting and organizing information have a profound impact on the generation of creative solutions. However, much is not yet known regarding the...

The selection of sources of inspiration is a crucial moment while designing, as it can enhance design creativity. Designers seem to prefer using pictorial representation modalities despite empirical investigations indicating possible disadvantages of such unimodal approaches. Therefore, it is valid to ask whether designers are disregarding other av...

Searching for inspirational stimuli is an essential step in the initial stages of the design process. However, there is a lack of information on what designers search for during such a phase. There is no distinction between what student and professional designers use as inspirational sources or idea generation methods. We present the results of a q...

The selection of inspirational sources is a crucial step while designing, which potentially can enhance creativity. However, empirical investigations have demonstrated a dual-effect that some stimuli might have during idea generation. Therefore, it is valid to discuss whether designers are disregarding other stimuli, such as textual representations...

When facing a design problem, both novice and expert designers tend to rely on a variety of available sources to get inspired during idea generation. Therefore, searching for and collecting diverse stimuli during the early phases of the design process is considered a well-known practice amongst designers. Despite this general assumption, there is n...

Searching for sources of inspiration during the design process is a widespread activity and it is considered as a crucial step for most designers, independent of the degree of expertise. However, little is known about what designers use as sources of inspiration, and how they process such information to generate ideas and solve design problems. Whe...