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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. The results show that the group of using creative methods has better imagination at different design stages.

We report x-ray powder diffraction and temperature-dependent infrared reflectivity measurements of (Na(0.5)La(0.5))Cu(3)Ti(4)O(12) and (Na(0.5)Bi(0.5))Cu(3)Ti(4)O(12) in order to investigate the origin of their lower room-temperature dielectric constants in comparison with the giant value of CaCu(3)Ti(4)O(12). Substituting Ca with Na/La or Na/Bi is found to decrease all Ti-O-Ti angles by the TiO(6) octahedra tilts, resulting in an increase of the local structural disorder on the Na/La and Na/Bi compounds. Further, several infrared-active phonon modes show a broadening in their linewidths, reflecting that the coherency in these vibrational modes is degraded by disorder. Additionally, the lowest-frequency mode of the Ca material is observed to strengthen dramatically at low temperatures, but to a lesser extent in the Na/La and Na/Bi compounds. These results suggest the important role of the local structural disorder on the anomalous low-frequency dielectric response in these materials.

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