AbstractThis paper focuses on the challenges the students face in the design idea generation phase in the context of craft teacher education. Conclusions are based on three datasets - two in student and one in professional design context. All of the datasets were analyzed with qualitative content analysis. The results of the professional designers’ interviews are used to find insights for the ideation process in the novice context. The main challenges were found to be students’ prior experiences, their misconceptions of design process and the lack of methods of managing the ideation part of designing. It was concluded that theoretical knowledge but also practical experience of profound ideation process is essential for learning and fading the misconceptions. Practices to narrow down the design space and rehearsals based on multimodal experiments are suggested in order to achieve self-generated learning in students.