In the field of design, the challenge in the ideation process is determining how to balance between constraining a task and at the same time creating new paths for expression. The focus of this article is on students’ idea generation process during the module of their textile design learning in a higher-education programme. In the module, students completed an open-ended design assignment. The assignment encouraged reflective insights about individual and shared practices and emphasized material experimentation during the ideation process. The data were drawn from interviews, essays, diaries and observations of real-time processes. This article reports students’ ways of interpreting sources of inspiration, related constraining processes and students’ reflections.

The purpose of this study was to describe the sources of inspiration and the emergence of mental images in a virtual design course. The study was conducted in The Department of Home Economics and Craft Science at the University of Helsinki. During the virtual course, eleven students designed fabric collage textiles and carried out exercises using the technique in a networked environment. Qualitative content analysis was performed on the collected visual and verbal data. The study indicated that typical mental images related to visual, kinaesthetic and verbal aspects of design activity. It was essential to use diverse processing of mental images and multisensory sources of inspiration. A virtual environment lacks face-to-face interactions but, at the same time, it seems to provide a shared body of experiences about design examples. 105 ADCHE 7 (2) pp. 105-119

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