The Research On Divergent Thinking And Design Media In Industrial Design

The divergent thinking, as the core of the creative thinking, can ensure designers to provide product a guarantee to improve the quality of living. So the research on how to make the divergent thinking more efficient is practically meaningful and significant.Design, before it is put into practice, must be visualized with appropriate media. Design presentation in product design is a process of information transmission, a process of idea optimization, or namely human's information processing. Thinking and media locate at both end of information processing chain, which can be thought as the academic base of the research on the relation of thinking and media. The more advanced technology of media transmission not only makes the design handier but also influences the people's thinking, as well as the origin of design. So the research on thinking and media precisely meets the practical need of design.Which media is more efficient for designer's creative activities with divergent thinking? This paper attempts to examine the effect of three media on divergent thinking in industrial design, they are: graphic media, digital media and physical model.Based on some important theories, including the theory of information processing, the cognition and the creative thinking, this paper discusses the characteristics of visual information according with the divergent thinking by theories and experiments, then discusses the characteristics on media by survey and design examples. By discussing the relationship between the both, this paper can analyze the influence of the media acting on divergent thinking.This paper draws several conclusions as follows: 1) the graphic media is the best among three media on originality and must be used adequately; 2) the digital media is used widely because it's precise, duplicatable and repeatable; 3) the physical model should reform to help designers to exert creativity while keeping the advantage of authenticity. How can we recombine three media according to their preponderant characteristics is worth to be considered and researched.