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Gaining insights into the creative process of designing nature inspired product forms

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Abstract

Nature-inspired designs/organic designs exhibit a very close resemblance with nature especially in terms of form and structure. Form giving for organic design is a special class of design problem that involves the use of inspiration and analogies from nature for creative problem-solving. There is insufficient research in understanding this phenomenon that could help design practitioners and educators to develop new methods and tools. This study adopts an integrated approach of protocol analysis with grounded theory to examine the data of twelve design students. The study identifies various design factors responsible for the generation of product forms inspired by nature and their influence on the form generation process of design students. A theoretical model/framework is proposed on the form generation process based on these findings.

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Authors agree to share the transcripts of the participants if they are required for the review process and requested by the reviewers.

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Acknowledgements

Authors would like to thank all the twelve senior master’s students in industrial design from the Department of Design, IIT Guwahati for their participation in the experiment. The authors would like to thank Mr. Satish Gokhale, Ms. Falguni Gokhale and Mr. Sereno, Design Directions Pvt. Ltd. for permission to use their product image in this paper.

Funding

This doctoral research work of the first author was financially supported under the Design Innovation Centres (DIC) scheme [DES/P/HOD/01] by the National Initiative for Design Innovation (NIDI) under the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of India.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, 781039, Assam, India

    Shiv Kumar Verma & Ravi Mokashi Punekar

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  1. Shiv Kumar Verma
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  2. Ravi Mokashi Punekar
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The work reported in this paper is a doctoral research work of the first author [Shiv Kumar Verma] under the supervision of second author [Prof. Ravi Mokashi Punekar].

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Correspondence to Shiv Kumar Verma.

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Appendix 1: Inspiration images and concept sketches of Task 1 and Task 2 for M1 and F2

Appendix 1: Inspiration images and concept sketches of Task 1 and Task 2 for M1 and F2

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Verma, S.K., Punekar, R.M. Gaining insights into the creative process of designing nature inspired product forms. Int J Technol Des Educ 33, 1007–1035 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-022-09749-y

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