An Empirical Study on the Impact of Design Brief Information on the Creativity of Design Outcomes With Consideration of Gender and Gender Diversity

Abstract

This study aims to understand how information in design briefs affects the creativity of design outcomes. We tested this during a Collaborative Sketching (C-Sketch) ideation exercise with first-year undergraduate student designers. We focus on four types of stimuli—quantitative requirements, a visual example (video), a physical example, and contextual information—and we measure creativity according to three metrics—novelty, appropriateness, and usability with either the participants’ gender or the gender diversity of the participants’ groups. The findings suggest that the main effect of providing a video example results in high appropriateness and usability scores but low novelty scores and that physical-contextual briefs have high novelty and usability scores. In addition, we did not find any correlation between gender or gender diversity and creativity scores.