Creativity in Design - How Designers Gather Information in the "preparation" Phase

Design cognition studies aim at describing designers’ mental strategies for solving design problems. So far, research has been focusing on the idea generation phases of design process and the early stages of design (before the very first ideas are generated) still remain incompletely understood. Yet, the preparation phase, called “fact-finding” by Osborn and “collect” phase by Schneiderman, is identified as a crucial step : designers “build knowledge about the problem” [Amabile]. An emergent trend in research is the focus on understanding early phases of design process (‘preparation’ or ‘information’ phase); in this context, our study aims at identifying and evaluating inspirational information used by professional designers before generating ideas, and at describing how inspirational information such as images are used. In future additional works, we will evaluate the influence of visual materials on generated ideas and design solutions. The