The Effects of Fusing 635 Brainstorming and C-Sketch Methods on the Creativity of Industrial Design

Creativity, one of the important abilities of industrial designers, can help designing and realizing innovative products. Today industrial design requires group collaboration too. How to effectively stimulate group creativity is an important issue on promoting innovation on products. Both the 635 brainstorming method and the C-Sketch method realize team-based divergent thinking techniques. The former uses words while the latter uses pictures as a way to stimulate group creativity. This study fuses the 635 brainstorming method and the C-Sketch method in an attempt to help group designers, by alternatively passing pictures and words in the divergent thinking phase, stimulating and integrating their ideas from different aspects for developing innovative products. To evaluate the feasibility of this hybrid technique, this study conducts two experiments. The results in the first experiment, using the proposed method, the originality and elaboration of the group creativity are significantly better than using the 635 brainstorming method, but the fluency and flexibility are not. In the second experiment, using the proposed method, the originality and elaboration of the group creativity are significantly better than using the C-Sketch method, but the flexibility is not. The C-Sketch method performs significantly better, nevertheless, than the proposed method in the fluency of group creativity. The proposed method is significantly better than the 635 brainstorming method and the C-Sketch method in improving designers' creativity thinking. Nevertheless, the measurements on the performances on the final products yield no significant differences between the proposed method and the 635 brainstorming method or the C-Sketch method.