A TAM-based survey and structural equation model show that AI application significantly and positively affects leather product designers' curiosity, imagination, risk-taking, and challenge, while perceived usefulness does not significantly mediate the risk-taking dimension.

The study proposes and tests a theoretical model of "AI application - technology perception - professional creativity," decomposing the influence of AI application on designers' creativity into mediating paths through perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. Prior discussion of AI and creativity has largely stayed at the level of direct effects; by introducing the two technology-perception constructs from TAM as mediators, this work turns "how AI affects creativity" from a broad association into a testable path structure. Evidence comes from structured questionnaire data collected from leather product designers and is empirically tested with confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, i.e., cross-sectional self-report survey evidence.

AI application shows a significant positive influence on all four dimensions of professional creativity: curiosity, imagination, risk-taking, and challenge. Rather than treating creativity as a single global variable, the study follows Williams' creativity theory in splitting it into four dimensions and testing them separately, yielding a finer mapping between AI application and distinct facets of creativity. Conclusions rest on path tests in a structural equation model of questionnaire data; the abstract reports "significant positive influence" without giving specific path coefficients or effect sizes in the visible text.

Perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness both play significant mediating roles in the curiosity, imagination, and challenge dimensions; for the risk-taking dimension, only perceived ease of use is a significant mediator, while the impact of perceived usefulness is not statistically significant. This cross-dimension difference indicates that the mediating mechanism of technology perception is not uniform across all facets of creativity, and that risk-taking depends less on "usefulness" than the other dimensions, offering a new empirical clue for distinguishing mechanisms across creativity components. Mediation effects are estimated by structural equation modeling; the abstract explicitly distinguishes significant from non-significant dimensions but reports no coefficient magnitudes, confidence intervals, or sample size.

The study offers theoretical grounds and practical references for the leather industry in promoting digital design, establishing AI training systems, and enhancing the innovation capabilities of design teams. It anchors the link between technology cognition and design creativity in a concrete industry setting (leather product design), giving the combination of TAM and creativity theory an actionable management orientation. This is an applied inference drawn from the empirical results above; the abstract provides no intervention experiment or longitudinal tracking evidence.

The study applies to the occupational group of leather product designers and to research settings that measure AI application, technology perception, and creativity through self-report questionnaires. Its model can be used directly to guide the leather industry in rolling out digital design tools, designing AI training content, and assessing changes in design teams' innovation capacity across curiosity, imagination, risk-taking, and challenge. For researchers wishing to combine TAM with creativity theory, the framework offers a reusable variable structure that can be transplanted to other design or creative occupational settings for further testing.

The visible text is only an abstract and reports no sample size, sampling approach, questionnaire reliability and validity indices, path coefficients, or effect sizes, nor the time and region of data collection, so the robustness and magnitude of the results cannot be judged. The study uses a cross-sectional questionnaire, with AI application, technology perception, and creativity measured at a single time point, leaving room to discuss causal direction. Whether the non-significant mediation of perceived usefulness in the risk-taking dimension reflects a mechanism difference or measurement or sample characteristics is not explained in the abstract. In addition, creativity is measured with a self-report scale, and its relationship to objective indicators such as work output or performance remains unclear. These questions are directions that follow-up research could pursue.