Research on the influence of organizational form of inspirational information in conceptual design: Workload and creativity

The relationship between information organization and innovation behavior is an important area of study, yet research on the behavior of designers in this regard is underexplored. This study experimentally compared the effects of two forms of inspirational information organization, single-organization (using folders only) and multi-organization (folders plus tags), on designers’ design creativity in the conceptual design stage. The main findings are: (1) The use of tags in the multi-organization form facilitates a more in-depth and involved processing of inspiration information, and significantly improves the effort score. In addition, it reduces the mental and temporal demands in the retrieval process and does not add too much workload to the subjects. (2) Information organization methods have different impacts on creativity. The results show that by using a multi-organization method, the novelty of design solutions can be improved. This study verifies the positive impact of multiple organizations as an inspirational information structuring method on design creativity, which provides a directional reference for the development activities of information organization tools for designers.