Inspirational stimuli, such as analogies, are a prominent mechanism used to support designers. However, generating relevant inspirational stimuli remains challenging. This work explores the potential of using an untrained crowd workforce to generate stimuli for trained designers. Crowd workers developed solutions for twelve open-ended design problems from the literature. Solutions were text-mined to extract words along a frequency domain, which, along with computationally derived semantic distances, partitioned stimuli into closer or further distance categories for each problem. The utility of these stimuli was tested in a human subjects experiment (N = 96). Results indicate crowdsourcing holds potential to gather impactful inspirational stimuli for open-ended design problems. Near stimuli improve the feasibility and usefulness of designs solutions, while distant stimuli improved their uniqueness.

诸如类比之类的鼓舞人心的刺激是用来支持设计师的重要机制。然而，产生相关的励志刺激仍然具有挑战性。这项工作探索了使用未经培训的人群劳动力为受过培训的设计师产生刺激的潜力。人群中的工人根据文献为十二个开放式设计问题开发了解决方案。对解决方案进行了文本挖掘，以提取沿频域的单词，该频域与计算得出的语义距离一起，针对每个问题将刺激分为更近或更远的距离类别。这些刺激的效用已在人类受试者实验中进行了测试（N = 96）。结果表明，众包有潜力收集对开放式设计问题有影响的鼓舞人心的激励因素。近距离刺激提高了设计解决方案的可行性和实用性，而远距离刺激提高了其独特性。