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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 design Masters students while generating ideas for a design problem. The results indicate that searching for and selecting stimuli require different levels of cognitive effort, depending on whether there is unlimited or limited access to stimuli. Furthermore, three important stages of the inspiration process were identified: keyword definition, stimuli search and stimuli selection. For each of these stages, we elaborate on how designers define keywords, which search approaches they use and what drives their selection of stimuli. This paper contributes to an understanding of how designers can be supported in their inspiration process in a more detailed manner.

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 available stimuli, such as textual representations. In order to answer this question and to find out about the usefulness of different textual stimuli during ideation phases, we exposed novice designers to three types of written stimuli, with different semantic levels. The results indicate that between close and very distant related types of stimuli, there is an intermediate type that is likely to stimulate participants to generate a larger number of more flexible and original ideas. This intermediate type of stimulus seems to prompt designers to generate ideas that are more creative in terms of fluency, flexibility, and originality. Conversely, the too close and the too distant stimuli reveal being less useful for creative problem solving. Looking into alternative types of stimuli, as well as stimuli entailing varying levels of distance with the problem at hand, can possibly help designers in increasing their creative potential.

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