A Study on the Effect of Students’ Imagination by Utilizing the Creative Methods in Industrial Design Course

The university students in departments of industrial design can perform quite well in design basis, practice courses, but their design thinking and imagination appear to be limited. The lack diversity and innovativeness may affect products they design. Therefore, incorporation of innovative theories and methods in design courses to stimulate students’ imagination to enhance their performance can be an area worth examining in order to improve current design education. The purpose of this study is to investigate theories and methods that can be adopted in industrial design curriculum planning to stimulate imagination and analyze the effects on students’ imaginations. Five experts, each with more than 10 years of experiences in industrial design, are invited to work with the research team to apply the contents of STEP Factors Analysis, Image Mind Map, TRIZ Method, Persona, and Scenario to design courses to be taught to second-year design class in a university for 18 weeks. There are 52 students and they are divided into two groups, 26 people each. The experimental group takes the courses designed to stimulate imagination and the control group the original courses. The experts use a 5-point Likert scale in which Vygotsky’s imagination indexes are adapted to record the imagination each week.