This study aims to understand how information in design briefs affects the creativity of design outcomes. We tested this during a Collaborative Sketching (C-Sketch) ideation exercise with first-year undergraduate student designers. We focus on four types of stimuli—quantitative requirements, a visual example (video), a physical example, and contextual information—and we measure creativity according to three metrics—novelty, appropriateness, and usability with either the participants’ gender or the gender diversity of the participants’ groups. The findings suggest that the main effect of providing a video example results in high appropriateness and usability scores but low novelty scores and that physical-contextual briefs have high novelty and usability scores. In addition, we did not find any correlation between gender or gender diversity and creativity scores.

This paper aims to identify factors that influence creativity, and strives towards understanding the effect of representations, namely abstract and concrete design outcomes. Three conditions are compared; a control group, an abstract group, and a group provided with various example solutions. The implications of this work can strongly impact the formulation of design briefs, where the goal is to stimulate the creativity of design brief outcomes and examine their relationship to product awareness.

The purpose of this work is to compare the creative outcome in the educational context of students belonging to two different cultures, namely Singaporean and Portuguese and determine whether they respond differently to the same design brief. The participants from both samples equal 121 student designers and span from 18–25 years old. Students were randomly distributed within a uniform, standard of student performance, which allowed for fair comparison between groups. Expert judges were employed to judge the creativity of concept sketches generated during a Collaborative Sketching exercise. To evaluate the creative outcome, we employed the Consensual Assessment Technique based on a rubric-based system developed in our earlier works. The analysis of variance procedure revealed no statistically significant difference between the averaged total scores of the two groups on the appropriateness measure. However, the student designers from both samples showed statistically significant differences when provided with a baseline brief in the novelty measure. In consideration of the overall creativity scores, a relatively equivalent performance is observed across the two universities.

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