An experimental study on the design thinking process started from difficult keywords: modeling the thinking process of creative design

We focused on designer's drawings to determine how designers made images of a design object from given keywords. We thought that difficult keywords would give us good clues to understanding the designers' creative thinking process. An experiment was held to examine designers' creative thinking. The subjects were assigned a task to design ‘a chair which gives a sad image’. Subjects' drawings were evaluated and words on sketches were structured into meaning hierarchy. From the results, we found that when the design goal was difficult to convert to the forms, the designer tried decomposing the meaning of the design goal into an adequate level to be able to image forms. Based on this study, we present a model of a thinking path for understanding the creative thinking process of design.