Design Fixation and Its Mitigation: A Study on the Role of Expertise

2013 ◽  
Vol 135 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vimal K. Viswanathan ◽  
Julie S. Linsey
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Problem ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Design Fixation ◽  
Novice Designers ◽  
Novel Products

Engineering idea generation plays a vital role in the development of novel products. Prior studies have shown that designers fixate to the features of example solutions and replicate these features in their ideas. This type of fixation acts as a major hindrance in idea generation, as it restricts the solution space where designers search for their ideas. Building upon the study by Linsey et al. [2010, “A Study of Design Fixation, Its Mitigation and Perception in Engineering Design Faculty,” ASME Trans. J. Mech. Des., 132, 041003], this study hypothesizes that designers fixate to example features and this fixation can be mitigated using certain defixation materials including alternate representations of the design problem. To investigate this, the experiment conducted by Linsey et al. [2010] with engineering design faculty is replicated with novice designers. Participants generate ideas for a design problem in three groups: one group working with a fixating example, a second group working with the same example along with alternate representations of the design problem and a control group. The obtained results show that both the novice designers and design faculty fixate to the same extent, whereas the defixation materials have differential effect on the two groups. This result indicates that design researchers need to be very careful in developing methods and guidelines that are formulated and tested with studies on novice designers. The effectiveness of such measures may vary with the level of expertise of the designer.

A Study on the Role of Expertise in Design Fixation and its Mitigation

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vimal Viswanathan ◽  
Julie Linsey
Keyword(s):  
Design Problem ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Design Fixation ◽  
Novice Designers ◽  
Novel Products

Engineering idea generation plays a vital role in the development of novel products. Prior studies have shown that designers fixate to the features of example solutions and replicate these features in their ideas. This is a major hindrance in idea generation as it restricts the solution space where designers search for their ideas. This study hypothesizes that though expert designers fixate to example features, they still can outperform novices in terms of quantity of ideas as they have a larger set of knowledge acquired through their experience. To investigate this, the experimental by Linsey et al. is replicated for novice designers. Novices generate ideas for a design problem in three groups: one group working with a fixating example, a second group working with the same example along with alternate representations for the design problem and a control group only presented with the problem and no additional materials. The obtained results support the hypothesis. Both novice and expert designers are fixated to the example features, but the expert designers generated more nonredundant ideas. The alternate representations of the design problem help experts in mitigating their fixation, whereas in novices, these have no effect.

A Comparison of Variety Metrics in Engineering Design

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Henderson ◽  
Kevin Helm ◽  
Kathryn Jablokow ◽  
Seda McKilligan ◽  
Shanna Daly ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Problem ◽  
Mechanical Engineering ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
New Variety ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Correlation Analyses ◽  
Design Ideas

This paper focuses on comparing and contrasting methods for assessing the variety of a group of design ideas. Variety is an important attribute of design ideas, because it indicates the extent to which the solution space has been explored. There is a greater likelihood of successfully solving a design problem when a more diverse set of ideas is generated in the early stages of design. While there are three existing metrics for variety, it has not been established how well they correlate with each other, so it is unknown whether they provide similar assessments of variety. This uncertainty inspired our investigation of the three existing metrics and, eventually, the development of a new variety metric — all of which we compared statistically and qualitatively. In particular, 104 design ideas collected from 29 sophomore mechanical engineering students were analyzed using the existing and new variety metrics. We conducted correlation analyses to determine if the four metrics were related and to what degree. We also considered the qualitative differences among these metrics, along with where they might be used most effectively. We found varying levels of statistically significant correlations among the four metrics, indicating that they are dependent. Even so, each metric offers a unique perspective on variety and may be useful in different situations.

Favoring Complexity: A Mixed Methods Exploration of Factors That Influence Concept Selection in Design for Additive Manufacturing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohan Prabhu ◽  
Rainmar L. Leguarda ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson ◽  
Nicholas A. Meisel
Keyword(s):  
Additive Manufacturing ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Concept Selection ◽  
Educational Groups ◽  
Early Design Stages ◽  
Traditional Manufacturing ◽  
Design For Am

Abstract The capabilities of additive manufacturing (AM) open up designers’ solution space and enable them to build designs previously impossible through traditional manufacturing. To leverage AM, designers must not only generate creative ideas, but also propagate these ideas without discarding them in the early design stages. This emphasis on selecting creative ideas is particularly important in design for AM (DfAM), as ideas perceived as infeasible through the traditional design for manufacturing lens could now be feasible with AM. Several studies have discussed the role of DfAM in encouraging creative idea generation; however, there is a need to understand concept selection in DfAM. In this paper, we investigated the effect of two variations in DfAM education: 1) restrictive DfAM and 2) dual DfAM (opportunistic and restrictive) on students’ concept selection process. Specifically, we compared the creativity of the concepts generated by the students to the creativity of the concepts selected by them. Further, we performed qualitative analyses to explore the rationale provided by the students in making these design decisions. From the results, we see that teams from both educational groups select ideas of greater usefulness; however, only teams from the restrictive DfAM group select ideas of higher uniqueness and overall creativity. Further, we see that introducing students to opportunistic DfAM increases their emphasis on the complexity of designs when evaluating and selecting them. These results highlight the need for DfAM education to encourage AM designers to not just generate but also select creative ideas.

scholarly journals The Role of Paternal Age and Occurrence of Orofacial Clefts in South Indian Population

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (31) ◽  
pp. 2465-2469
Author(s):  
Soumi Samuel ◽  
Rajendra Prasad B. ◽  
Thara Chandran ◽  
Deeyah Miriam Deepak ◽  
Shaji Thomas ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Congenital Anomalies ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Paternal Age ◽  
Control Group ◽  
South Indian Population ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Orofacial Cleft ◽  
Orofacial Clefts ◽  
South Indian

BACKGROUND The association between orofacial cleft and parental age is evident. This study focuses on paternal age playing a vital role in the birth of children with orofacial clefts. We wanted to assess the role of paternal age as a factor in the development of congenital anomalies in this study. METHODS A case control study was performed on 1000 cases and 250 controls in Mangalore. The parents were interviewed regarding their age at the time of conception. RESULTS 46.4 % of fathers of the cleft children belonged to 30 - 34 years of age group and 25 % belonged to 25 - 29 years of age group at the time of conception. In the control group, 38 % belonged to 30 - 34 years of age group and 24.8 % belonged to 25 - 29 years of age group. CONCLUSIONS Paternal age in the age group of 30 - 34 years has significant contribution in the birth of orofacial children with cleft deformities. KEY WORDS Orofacial cleft, Paternal Age, Congenital anomalies

The Impact of Example Modality and Physical Interactions on Design Creativity

2014 ◽  
Vol 136 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine A. Toh ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Controlled Study ◽  
First Year ◽  
Design Creativity ◽  
Physical Interactions ◽  
2D And 3D ◽  
The Impact

Interacting with example products is an essential and widely practiced method in engineering design, yet little information exists on how the representation (pictorial or physical) or interaction a designer has with an example impacts design creativity. This is problematic because without this knowledge we do not understand how examples affect idea generation or how we can effectively modify or develop design methods to support example usage practices. In this paper, we report the results of a controlled study with first year engineering design students (N = 89) developed to investigate the impact of a designer's interaction with either a two-dimensional (2D) pictorial image or a three-dimensional (3D) product (through visual inspection or product dissection activities) and the resulting functional focus and creativity of the ideas developed. The results of this study reveal that participants who interacted with the physical example produced ideas that were less novel and less functionally focused than those who interacted with the 2D representation. Additionally, the results showed that participants who dissected the product produced a higher variety of ideas than those that visually inspected it. These results contribute to our understanding of the benefits and role of 2D and 3D designer-product interactions during idea development. We use these findings to develop recommendations for the use of designer-product interactions throughout the design process.

scholarly journals Exploring the Role of Linguistic Abstraction in Idea-Generation Sessions

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 329-338
Author(s):  
Rafaella Antoniou ◽  
Elies Dekoninck ◽  
Jérémy Bonvoisin
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Early Attempt ◽  
Linguistic Abstraction ◽  
Fundamental Research ◽  
Linguistic Categories ◽  
Concrete Language ◽  
Do So

AbstractFor many years, both academia and industry have been interested in increasing the efficiency of idea- generation meetings. Alex Osborne's (1953) rules for brainstorming are an early attempt to do so, and have extensively been used in engineering design, however their effectiveness has been questioned with recent research, and a need for fundamental research to establish which practices are useful arises. This study is an attempt in investigating linguistic abstraction in idea-generation meetings, in order to establish whether any best practices can be distilled from the language used. Engineering design group meetings were recorded and transcribed, and was analysed using a coding framework which was developed for analysing linguistic categories as well as the ideas that were generated during those meetings. More particularly, the study investigates the average abstractness/concreteness of speech throughout the duration of the meetings, as well as the switching between abstract and concrete language and vice versa while comparing idea-related discourse and non-idea related discourse switching. The coding framework proposed is considered robust enough to carry out further work.

Dissection Versus Incubation: The Within-Subject Effects of Product Dissection Activities on Design Variety

2019 ◽  
Vol 142 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Starkey ◽  
Mohammad Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Samuel Hunter ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Personality Test ◽  
Educational Tool ◽  
Incubation Condition ◽  
Undergraduate Engineering ◽  
Design Ideas

Abstract Product dissection is a popular educational tool in engineering design due to its ability to help students understand a product, provide inspiration for new design ideas, and aid in product redesign. While prior research has investigated how dissecting a product before idea generation impacts the creative output of the ideation session, these studies failed to look at the types of ideas generated before dissection or how the type of product dissected impacts this. Thus, the goal of the current study was to examine how product dissection impacts the solution space explored by students. Fifty-five undergraduate engineering students participated in the experiment; 40 participants virtually dissected a product, while the remaining 15 completed a personality test. The results of the study highlight that students explored new types of ideas during the second ideation session for all conditions and at all levels, with students having the biggest increase in embodiment variety when they dissected analogically far products. Overall, there were no differences in design variety between students in the dissection condition and the incubation condition. This study highlights how incubation can impact design variety and calls for further investigation of the interaction between product dissection and incubation.

scholarly journals Visual Inspection or Product Dissection? The Impact of Designer-Product Interactions on Engineering Design Creativity

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine A. Toh ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Visual Inspection ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Controlled Study ◽  
Creative Thought ◽  
Design Creativity ◽  
Product Interaction ◽  
The Impact

Designers commonly interact with products in the early phases of design in order to understand the solution space and gain inspiration for new designs. Although designer-product interaction methods such as visual inspection and product dissection are recognized as a pivotal component of the engineering design process, little data is available on how these practices affect idea generation or when these activities are most useful for inspiring creative thought. Therefore, the current study was developed to understand the impact of these activities on creative idea generation. During our controlled study, fifty-nine undergraduate engineering students were instructed to either visually inspect or physically dissect an example milk frother and then generate ideas for a new, innovative design. These concepts were then evaluated for their novelty, variety, quality and quantity. Our analysis (ANOVA) revealed that participants who physically dissected the example frother produced ideas that were more novel but of lower quality than those that simply inspected the frother. Our results provide insights on the impact of designer-product interactions on creativity and we use these findings to develop recommendations for the use and alterations of these practices for improving creativity in engineering design.

Evaluating the Directed Intuitive Approach for Bioinspired Design

2014 ◽  
Vol 136 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Glier ◽  
Joanna Tsenn ◽  
Julie S. Linsey ◽  
Daniel A. McAdams
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Method ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Design Methods ◽  
Design Knowledge ◽  
Design Problems ◽  
Bioinspired Design ◽  
Engineering Problems ◽  
Novice Designers ◽  
The Impact

Bioinspired design, the practice of looking to nature to find inspiration for solutions to engineering problems, is increasingly a desired approach to design. It allows designers to tap a wealth of time-tested solutions to difficult problems in a domain less considered by designers. Only recently have researchers developed organized, systematic methods for bioinspired design. Traditionally, bioinspired design has been conducted without the benefit of any organized method. Designers relied on the informal “directed intuitive approach” of bioinspired design, which simply directs designers to consider how nature might solve a problem. This paper presents an experiment to explore the impact of the directed approach on idea generation. This experiment is foundationally important to bioinspired engineering design method research. The results of this experiment serve as a fundamental baseline and benchmark for the comparison of more systematic, and often more involved, bioinspired design methods. A group of 121 novice designers are given one of two design problems and instructed to either generate solutions using the directed approach or to generate solutions without being prompted in any additional fashion. Based on the findings presented here, the directed approach offers designers no advantage in the average number of nonredundant ideas, quality, novelty, or variety of the solutions produced. In conclusion, systematic and organized methods for bioinspired design should be sought to effectively leverage nature's design knowledge.

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