This study is aimed at ways to assess and improve design students’ creative outcomes and assist educators in crafting design briefs for design studios. The procedure entails a controlled yet analytical experiment in a university setting intended to test the potential of using analogical thinking to enhance the Novelty and Usefulness of design solutions. The control group received a brief that contained stimuli in the form of typical examples without instructions to use analogies. A second group was provided with a brief including stimuli elicited by text representations in the form of word pairs, and instructions to use textual analogies. The last group received the same stimuli as the other groups above; however, with instructions to identify negative features before using textual analogies. One hundred and seven first-year undergraduate students took part in the study. The results demonstrated that design briefs with specific instructions to use textual-based analogies contributed to highly novel outcomes. However, when analogies were elicited by statements concerning negative issues of the design task, students were able to produce more useful outcomes. We suggest that textual-based analogies can be employed as a good in-class pedagogical tool for improving novice designers’ creative outcomes overall.

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The concept of inclusivity involved an understanding of people, programmes and places, embedded with complex issues. 21 student designers took part in a first-of-its-kind five-day codesign programme to develop solutions for inclusive and engaged communities with residents. This quasi-experimental study aimed to develop a value-based approach using likelihood ratio table and a Naïve Bayes classifier method to assess the success of a codesign programme, in comparison to past programmes with different design challenges. Methodology proposed a systematic investigation to evaluate this programme holistically. Students discussed with stakeholders to uncover the complexities of human and environmental factors in design at early stage of ideation, and semi-structured participants’ observation tasks were considered instead of researcher's observations in the method of assessment. Selected teams were introduced to two new design methods to empathise better with seniors, i.e., Care Circle and See and Shoot. Findings revealed that these teams showed greater levels of critical inquiry when overcoming three key challenges, i.e., (1) identifying key personas, (2) examining potential use environment, and (3) access to market.

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