Research on Ideation Process and Design Productivity of ChatGPT Based on LASSO and Linkography

In design, good ideas are the source of a designer’s creativity. With the development of artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) represented by ChatGPT shows excellent conversational and creative reasoning capabilities. However, we still know very little about the design ideation process and its performance in terms of productivity. In this paper, we propose a representation of the design ideation process based on NLP. On this basis, referring to LASSO and linkography method, we propose a DCLASSO model to calculate the interconnections between design moves in protocol analysis. In the subsequent experiment, we take the design protocols generated by ChatGPT as the experimental sample to verify the proposed model. Finally, with the generated linkographs, the characteristics of ChatGPT and human designers are analyzed and compared from aspects of design ideation process and design productivity.