INTERNATIONAL DESIGN CONFERENCE - DESIGN 2018 https://doi.org/10.21278/idc.2018.0458 HOW TO SELECT APPROPRIATE STIMULATION MECHANISMS TO PERFORM AN ECO-IDEATION SESSION? B. Tyl, F. Vallet and O. Pialot Abstract The generation of eco-innovative ideas requires the development of specific heuristics or stimuli. If several types of heuristics have been elaborated in innovation -and eco-innovation-, the selection of appropriate heuristics adapted to an industrial problem for ideation -and eco-ideation- have not been addressed. This paper explores three methods for selecting heuristics called Eco-ideation Stimulation Mechanisms (ESM) for an energy-based case: (1) an examination of environmental issues; (2) a direct screening of the problem through the ESMs; (3) an examination of inspiring cases. Keywords: eco-ideation, eco-ideation stimulation mechanism, eco-innovation, design creativity, design methods 1. Introduction World population is expected to rise from 7.6 billion in 2017 to 8.4-8.7 billion in 2030 and eventually 9.4-10.2 billion in 2050 (United Nations, 2017). Besides demographic pressure, environmental stress and changing modes of value creation by business are indeed drivers of sustainable development (Fussler and James, 1996). Aligned to these objectives, eco-innovation “integrates the long-term trends that will transform consumption, value creation and material processes” (Fussler and James, 1996). For Hofstra and Huysingh (2014), eco-innovation has to be envisaged thanks to a new interaction paradigm between humans and nature, at odds with deeply rooted anthropocentric ideas. Their definition of eco-innovation is hence “inventions, designs and new solutions for fulfilling human’s and nature’s needs in ecologically effective ways” (Hofstra and Huysingh, 2014). Eco-innovation often starts from ill-defined problems, i.e. problems with various objectives, with a systemic approach, and requiring different ways of exploration (Jonassen and Hung, 2008; Hocking and Vernon, 2017). Moreover, literature on innovation explains the crucial role of problem finding and its consequences on the creativity of the design team (Hocking and Vernon, 2017). It ca ne argued that problem finding, or more generally speaking, the starting point of an eco-ideation process, requires some techniques to foster the generation of relevant ideas. Nevertheless, despite various researches on stimuli, or heuristics (Goldschmidt and Smolkov, 2006; Yilmaz et al., 2015), Gonçalves et al. (2016) claim that the inspiration process, that is to say designers' selection of stimuli during the development of a design problem, has not really been investigated in research. Although various contributions on eco-ideation and ideation stimuli (or heuristics) have been made in the past years, the concern of selection of stimuli prior to the eco-ideation process has also been overlooked. The overall research question addressed in the paper is expressed as follows: “How to support the identification of relevant heuristics during the problem framing of an eco-ideation process?” Section 2 addresses the development of stimuli in innovation and eco-innovation, and the need to connect the selection of stimuli to the problem finding phase. Section 3 documents the experimental SOCIOTECHNICAL ISSUES IN DESIGN 2763