Inspiration for styling tasks

Inspiration is vital for designers. This study builds on findings on inspiration examples for problem-solving tasks and extends those to styling tasks by exploring the influence of examples on styling criteria. The generation of inspiration examples in this study is grounded in design literature and practice. This study identifies primary styling criteria (i.e., personality coherence, visual coherence, and originality) to evaluate the design outcome. The results indicate that designers who received near-field examples that communicated an intended meaning compared to designers who did not receive any examples generated concepts with a higher personality coherence yet with a similar level of originality. Also, near-field visual examples increased visual coherence. Thus, different design criteria need specific examples.