A study on the link between design brief structure and stimulus fidelity to optimize novelty and usefulness

Abstract This academic-based investigation is focused on identifying elements that contribute toward the generation of efficient design briefs and their correlation with design outcomes of a sketching exercise. Four conditions are compared: a baseline group, an abstract group, a contextual information group, and a group that was given various example solutions. Via more in-depth surveys, we sought to elicit correlations between the students’ design creativity and stimuli permutations of the different design conditions. Results show that the contextual information groups, which were presented with higher levels of stimulus fidelity, had higher novelty scores, while abstract groups performed well in usefulness. These findings contribute to the formulation of design briefs where the goal is to stimulate the creativity of design outcomes and examine their relationships with student's perceptions of design exercises.