M.G. Gonçalves (Milene), MSc

PhD candidate
Product Innovation Management 

Biography

Milene Gonçalves was born in 1985 in Faro, Portugal. For her Bachelor, Milene moved to Lisbon, where she got her Industrial Design Bachelor degree and later on her Master degree in Product Design at FA-UTL (Faculdade de Arquitectura, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa). Her Master thesis explores the designer’s importance in the construction of personal and cultural identity. Using as case in point the example of micro-cars (a specific branch of automotive design), Milene studied how these could be understood as reflections of users’ identities and cultural representations. She used a multidisciplinary approach, where the contributions of Design, Anthropology and History on the topic of identity are combined. Milene’s research illustrated the relevance of the designer as a ‘cultural artefacts creator’ in the development of cultural identities and in the extension of lasting bonds between people and their objects.
Milene is a PhD candidate at IO-TU Delft since 2010. 

Education

2008 - 2009 
Master in Product Design
Faculdade de Arquitectura, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (FA-UTL), Faculty of Architecture, Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

2003 - 2008 
Bachelor in Industrial Design
Faculdade de Arquitectura, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (FA-UTL), Faculty of Architecture, Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

Experience

April 2010 – present
PhD student
Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft, The Netherlands

2009 
Research designer
Centro de Estudos Florestais, Instituto Superior de Agronomia (ISA-UTL), Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

Specialisation/Field of research

Supervisor: Petra Badke-Schaub, Co-supervisor: Carlos Cardoso

“How do different external stimuli influence designers during creative idea generation?”

Through design education and practice, designers encounter a wide range of information, with different content and configurations, from which a collection of design knowledge is assembled. This process - commonly considered as inspiration search - becomes especially relevant during design problem-solving, when external stimuli, such as books, drawings or physical designs, are used to generate ideas for the problem at hand. However, little is known about how designers use sources for inspiration, and especially how they process such information to generate ideas while solving design problems. Whilst previous investigations have shown both beneficial and detrimental influence of specific visual stimuli, there is a lack of information on the effect of other types of stimuli designers might use during idea generation. This research seeks to understand the influence and usefulness of certain types of external stimuli (such as pictorial and written) upon designers of different levels of expertise. Knowing how designers generate creative design solutions based upon external stimuli can reveal important outcomes for design education and practice.