Top Paper Award for Design Engineering PhD Student

Top Paper Award for Design Engineering PhD Student

The “2019 International Conference on Global Cooperation and Development of Cultural and Creative Industries”, was held in Shanghai on 21-24 November, 2019, with the theme of “Industry-Academy Collaboration and Opportunities in China”. Min Hua’s paper ‘Combinational visual stimuli and its CAD application in supporting design creativity’ was selected as the top 3 papers from over 450 submissions by the conference’s academic committee, and awarded a ‘Top Paper Award’. This paper explores the role of combinational visual stimuli delivery methods and its potential application for supporting creative design. An empirical study was conducted in this research with the aim of exploring if and how combinational pictorial stimuli can affect designers' creative performance. Results show that the design outcomes presented by a group exposed to combinational pictorial stimuli were rated as more creative than those given by a group exposed to no stimuli or palette pictorial stimuli. These results imply that the form of stimuli delivery can affect creative design outcomes and combinational pictorial stimuli best support design creativity among these three conditions. A user-adaptive computer-aided creativity tool that generates combinational pictorial stimuli was developed, and its usability was tested. Min Hua is currently studying for his PhD In the Dyson School of Design Engineering under the supervision of Professor Peter Childs.