Inspiration in Product Form Design: A Survey of Professional Industrial Designers

Inspiration has long been considered important in many creative professions including industrial design, which plays an important role in shaping visual appearance of products. A product’s visual appearance has a significant effect on consumer response and product success. In the form design process, industrial designers play an important role in formulating intended consumer response (i.e. intentions), and in generating and evaluating concepts to effectively communicate the intentions. They may seek inspiration from a variety of sources not only to generate ideas to realise intentions, but also to analyse and communicate intentions. However, there is little or no knowledge about which inspiration sources (e.g. similar products, dissimilar products, etc.) and inspiration media (e.g. images, text, etc.) they use in their activities associated with intentions. We carried out a survey with 55 professional industrial designers to address this knowledge gap.