Curvilinear effects of openness and agreeableness on the imaginative capability of student designers

•We examined the curvilinear effects of personality on design-student imagination.•A U-form relationship existed between openness and initiating imagination.•Agreeableness curvilinearly affected the transforming imagination of design students.

Every designer has a unique working style. The various working styles of designers reflect their distinct personality traits. Personality traits are a critical factor influencing design performance and play a decisive role in stimulating designer imagination. Research on designer personality and imagination is limited and overlooks the existence of curvilinear relationships among variables. We examined the curvilinear effects of openness and agreeableness on the imaginative capability of student designers, and collected data from 5 universities across Taiwan. The study participants consisted of 423 design majors. The results revealed that although the primary influence of openness on initiating imagination is linear, a curvilinear U-shaped relationship exists between openness and initiating imagination. The results for openness suggested that as the score for the trait increases, the possibility of conceiving and transforming imaginations increase. The results also indicated that agreeableness does not affect the initiating imagination, but reliably predicts the conceiving imagination of student designers. In addition, the association of agreeableness with transforming imagination exhibits an inverted U-shaped curvilinear relationship. This study uniquely contributes to the understanding of how various levels of openness and agreeableness affect the initiating and transforming imaginations of student designers in curvilinear aspects.