Out-of-the-Bucket Thinking Among Students with Heterogeneous Background While Solving Creative Problem by Using Combinatorial Tool

摘要

Master of design students at IIT Guwahati come from four different backgrounds—these are technical background, architecture background, fine arts background and design and fashion design background. The students were given a problem of technical in nature to be solved without any external support. The same set of students was given same problem to be solved introducing a combinatorial tool (designed based on visual stimuli and forced fitting). The introduction of combinatorial tool at the early stage of problem-solving process changed the approach from linear to nonlinear thinking, which affects the overall outcome of the creative problem-solving task. The paper will discuss the observations made on the results of both the tests and tried to establish the comparative statement between the results.