Chapter 8: Cultivating Creativity in Fashion Design Education: A Visual–textual Design Model to Address Online Visual Overload

A reliance on streamed content on social media, push notifications that satisfy ‘bubble focused’ aesthetics, and celebrity and influencer reach, has come to delimit design choices and the subsequent creative approaches student designers employ in problem solving and generating design solutions. This is not unusual, according to Kwon et al. (2023, p. 4), because designers typically prefer visual stimulation to initiate their creative process, ideation, and conceptualisation. Social media has streamlined access to visual content, allowing designers instantaneous exposure to a wide range of stimuli to inspire their creative processes. Broz (2024) highlighted this phenomenon, noting that 14 billion images are shared daily on social media platforms. While this increased access has opened possibilities for exploration and research into potential design solutions, it also presents challenges, as the sheer magnitude of visual information can overwhelm, inhibiting independent and considered creative problem-solving. This research proposes a design model that encourages the use of online visual stimuli without resorting to copying, appropriation or pastiche, respecting intellectual property. The model is underpinned by a framework that shifts the modality of the stimuli from visual to textual, highlighting the symbiotic relationship between visuals and texts in the creative process. Grounded in an interpretivist paradigm, the model guides the textualisation of visual stimuli towards the development of design criteria, in line with a designer’s creative individuality, authenticity, and expressiveness.