My Idea Is Best! Ownership Bias and its Influence on Engineering Concept Selection

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine A. Toh ◽  
Arti H. Patel ◽  
Andrew A. Strohmetz ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Concept Selection ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Final Design ◽  
Process Factors ◽  
The Impact

Concept selection is considered one of the most crucial components of the engineering design process because the direction of the final design is largely determined at this stage. One of the most widely utilized techniques for filtering designs during this process involves informal review meetings where team members identify the designs that most closely satisfy the design goals. While this is often seen as an efficient process, factors such as ownership bias, or an unintentional preference for an individuals’ own ideas, and team member personality attributes may impact an individual’s decision-making process. However, few studies have explored the impact of these factors on concept selection. Therefore, an empirical study was conducted with 37 engineering students in order to investigate the effect of these attributes on the selection or filtering of design concepts in engineering education. The results from this study show that personality impacts the proportion of ideas selected, and that male students tend to select more of their own ideas (ownership bias) than their female counterparts who more often select their team member’s concepts. These results add to our understanding of the factors that impact the team concept selection process and provide empirical evidence of the occurrence of ownership bias in engineering design education.

The Effects of Gender and Idea Goodness on Ownership Bias in Engineering Design Education

2016 ◽  
Vol 138 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine A. Toh ◽  
Andrew A. Strohmetz ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Concept Selection ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Final Design ◽  
The Impact

Concept selection is a critical stage of the engineering design process because of its potential to influence the direction of the final design. While formalized selection methods have been developed to increase its effectiveness and reduce human decision-making biases, research that understands these biases in more detail can provide a foundation for improving the selection process. One important bias that occurs during this process is ownership bias or an unintentional preference for an individual's own ideas over the ideas of others. However, few studies have explored ownership bias in a design setting and the influence of other factors such as the gender of the designer or the “goodness” of an idea. In order to understand the impact of these factors in engineering design education, a study was conducted with 110 engineering students. The results from this study show that male students tend to show ownership bias during concept selection by selecting more of their own ideas while female students tend to show the opposite bias, the Halo Effect, by selecting more of their team members' concepts. In addition, participants exhibited ownership bias for ideas that were considered good or high quality, but the opposite bias for ideas that were not considered good or high quality. These results add to our understanding of the factors that impact team concept selection and provide empirical evidence of the occurrence of ownership bias and the effects of gender and idea goodness in engineering design education.

The Impact of Team-Based Product Dissection on Design Novelty

2014 ◽  
Vol 136 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine A. Toh ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller ◽  
Gül E. Okudan Kremer
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Design Method ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Current Design ◽  
The Impact

Although design novelty is a critical area of research in engineering design, most research in this space has focused on understanding and developing formal idea generation methods instead of focusing on the impact of current design practices. This is problematic because formal techniques are often not adopted in industry due to the burdensome steps often included in these methods, which limit the practicality and adoption of these methods. This study seeks to understand the impact of product dissection, a design method widely utilized in academia and industry, on design novelty in order to produce recommendations for the use or alterations of this method for supporting novelty in design. To investigate the impact of dissection, a study was conducted with 76 engineering students who completed a team-based dissection of an electric toothbrush and then individually generated ideas. The relationships between involvement in the dissection activity, the product dissected, the novelty and quantity of the ideas developed were investigated. The results reveal that team members who were more involved in the dissection activity generated concepts that were more novel than those who did not. In addition, the type of the dissected product also had an influence on design novelty. Finally, a positive correlation between the number of ideas generated and the novelty of the design concepts was identified. The results from this study are used to provide recommendations for leveraging product dissection for enhancing novelty in engineering design education and practice.

The Role of Individual Risk Attitudes on the Selection of Creative Concepts in Engineering Design

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine A. Toh ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Ambiguity Aversion ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Individual Risk ◽  
Risk Attitudes ◽  
First Year ◽  
Concept Selection ◽  
Design Creativity ◽  
The Impact

While creativity is often seen as an indispensable quality of engineering design, individuals often select conventional or previously successful options during the concept selection process due to the inherent risk associated with creative concepts. Surprisingly, prior research has shown that this preference for conventional design alternatives is often done in an unconscious manner and is attributed to people’s inadvertent bias against creativity. While we know that designers may prematurely filter out creative ideas, little is actually known about what factors attribute to the promotion or filtering of these creative concepts during concept selection. The current paper describes an empirical study conducted with 19 first-year engineering students aimed at investigating the impact of individual risk aversion and ambiguity aversion on the selection and filtering of creative ideas during the concept selection process. The results from this study indicate that individual risk attitudes are related to both creative ability and creative concept selection. However, an individual’s ability to generate creative ideas was found to be unrelated to their preference for creative ideas during concept selection. These results add to our understanding of creativity during concept selection and provide guidelines for enhancing the design process to encourage design creativity.

scholarly journals How Concept Selection Tools Impact the Development of Creative Ideas in Engineering Design Education

2018 ◽  
Vol 140 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuan Zheng ◽  
Sarah C. Ritter ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Design Stage ◽  
Concept Selection ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Student Teams ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Selection Tools

Concept selection tools have been heavily integrated into engineering design education in an effort to reduce the risks and uncertainties of early-phase design ideas and aid students in the decision-making process. However, little research has examined the utility of these tools in promoting creative ideas or their impact on student team decision making throughout the conceptual design process. To fill this research gap, the current study was designed to compare the impact of two concept selection tools, the concept selection matrix (CSM) and the tool for assessing semantic creativity (TASC) on the average quality (AQL) and average novelty (ANV) of ideas selected by student teams at several decision points throughout an 8-week project. The results of the study showed that the AQL increased significantly in the detailed design stage, while the ANV did not change. However, this change in idea quality was not significantly impacted by the concept selection tool used, suggesting other factors may impact student decision making and the development of creative ideas. Finally, student teams were found to select ideas ranked highly in concept selection tools only when these ideas met their expectations, indicating that cognitive biases may be significantly impeding decision making.

Helping Teams Expand the Breadth of Their Solution Space Through Product Dissection: A Simulation Based Investigation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Christopher McComb ◽  
Samuel T. Hunter ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Computational Simulation ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
First Year ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Simulation Based ◽  
The Impact

Product dissection has been highlighted as an effective means of interacting with example products in order to produce creative outcomes. While product dissection is often conducted as a team in engineering design education as a component of larger engineering design projects, the research on the effectiveness of product dissection activities has been primarily limited to individuals. Thus, the goal of this study was to investigate the impact of the type(s) of product dissected in a team environment on the breadth of the design space explored and the underlying influence of educational level on these effects. This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 7,000 nominal brainstorming teams generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique that accounted for all possible team configurations. Specifically, each team was composed of four team members based on a design repository of 463 ideas generated by first-year and senior engineering design students after a product dissection activity. The results of the study highlight that simulated senior engineering design teams explored a larger solution space than simulated first-year teams and that dissecting different types of products allowed for the exploration of a larger solution space for all of the teams. The results also showed that dissecting two analogically far and two simple products was most effective in expanding the solution space for simulated senior teams. The findings presented in this study can lead to a better understanding of how to most effectively deploy product dissection modules in engineering design education in order to maximize the solution space explored.

Can Design Teams Be Empathically Creative? A Simulation-Based Investigation on the Role of Team Empathy on Concept Generation and Selection

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller ◽  
Jessica Menold ◽  
Jacquelyn Huff ◽  
Christopher McComb
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Computational Simulation ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
First Year ◽  
Concept Generation ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Design Activities ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Research on empathy has been surging in popularity in the engineering design community since empathy is known to help designers develop a deeper understanding of the users’ needs. Because of this, the design community has been invested in devising and assessing empathic design activities. However, research on empathy has been primarily limited to individuals, meaning we do not know how it impacts team performance, particularly in the concept generation and selection stages of the design process. Specifically, it is unknown how the empathic composition of teams, average (elevation) and standard deviation (diversity) of team members’ empathy, would impact design outcomes in the concept generation and selection stages of the design process. Therefore, the goal of the current study was to investigate the impact of team trait empathy on concept generation and selection in an engineering design student project. This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 13,482 teams of noninteracting brainstorming individuals generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique drawing upon a design repository of 806 ideas generated by first-year engineering students. The main findings from the study indicate that the elevation in team empathy positively impacted simulated teams’ unique idea generation and selection while the diversity in team empathy positively impacted teams’ generation of useful ideas. The results from this study can be used to guide team formation in engineering design.

Implementing Creativity Evaluation Tools Into the Concept Selection Process in Engineering Education

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Starkey ◽  
Christopher A. Gosnell ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Design Research ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Selection Method ◽  
Concept Selection ◽  
Design Creativity ◽  
Design Students ◽  
Study Teams ◽  
Expert Ratings

In design research, creativity assessment methods have been studied to obtain quantitative measurements of design novelty and feasibility for use in the concept selection process. However, little research exists that studies the application and implementation of these tools by engineering students on grade-dependent class projects. In this study, teams of undergraduate engineering design students evaluated their own early product sketches using informal team discussions, a creativity scale and our Tool for Assessing Semantic Creativity (TASC) adjective selection method. The resulting evaluations were compared and contrasted with evaluations obtained from the widely adopted Shah Vargas-Hernandez and Smith (SVS) method and expert ratings. These findings demonstrate that our TASC adjective selection method of evaluating design creativity is tapping into similar constructs of creativity as informal team discussions and expert evaluations. They also indicate that the SVS method does not appear to be evaluating creativity as perceived by engineering design students or experts. The results of this study can be used to understand how students make decisions during the concept selection process and how tools can be developed or implemented in the classroom setting to aid in this process.

A Document Analysis Method for Characterizing Design Team Performance

2003 ◽  
Vol 126 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Dong ◽  
Andrew W. Hill ◽  
Alice M. Agogino
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Design Teams ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Design Performance ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Semantic Coherence ◽  
Design Documentation ◽  
Design Documents ◽  
The Impact

The premise of this research is that the engineering design process is partially driven by achieving consensus and reconciling points of view among team members. Characterizing the quality of the design performance by measuring the coherence of the description of related design concepts and events in design documentation is examined. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was used to analyze design documentation written by self-managing, cross-functional engineering design teams. Computational measurements of document variance and textual coherence were applied to the teams’ design documents, presentation materials and e-mail communication. The levels of semantic coherence were correlated to assessments by faculty and product designers and engineers from industry of the design teams’ process and outcome quality. The results indicated a statistically significant positive correlation between design document coherence and design performance, especially for poorly performing teams. The impact of this research is to provide team managers (people who create teams and manage teams) or self-organizing teams (teams that focus on self-reflection and peer evaluation) computational tools that could be integrated with design information management technologies to assist them in the management of engineering design teams.

Which One Should I Pick? Concept Selection in Engineering Design Industry

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine A. Toh ◽  
Lisa M. Miele ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Formal Concept ◽  
Design Practice ◽  
Concept Selection ◽  
Design Concepts

There has been a wealth of research focused on methods for encouraging creativity during the conceptual design process due to the innate importance of creativity in engineering design. However, much of the research has focused on creativity in student designers, often neglecting to consider how professional designers perceive creativity — particularly during concept selection. In addition, while there are many formal concept selection techniques that have been adopted in design practice, it is unknown what specific types of tools professional designers use to select design concepts or the importance designers place on creativity during this selection process. In order to address this research void, an exploratory study was conducted with 27 professional designers using an online survey to understand their perceptions of creativity and the use of concept selection techniques in design industry. The results of this study are used to identify the factors that effect concept selection and increase our understanding of the creative process in engineering design industry.

A Pillar of Mechanical Engineering Design Education in Australia: 25 Years of the Warman Design and Build Competition

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren F. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Mechanical Engineering ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Student Assessment ◽  
National Committee ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Institutional Learning ◽  
History Of

The “Warman Design and Build Competition”, running across Australasian Universities, is now in its 26th year in 2013. Presented in this paper is a brief history of the competition, documenting the objectives, yearly scenarios, key contributors and champion Universities since its beginning in 1988. Assuming the competition has reached the majority of mechanical and related discipline engineering students in that time, it is fair to say that this competition, as a vehicle of the National Committee on Engineering Design, has served to shape Australasian engineering education in an enduring way. The philosophy of the Warman Design and Build Competition and some of the challenges of running it are described in this perspective by its coordinator since 2003. In particular, the need is for the competition to work effectively across a wide range of student group ability. Not every group engaging with the competition will be competitive nationally, yet all should learn positively from the experience. Reported also in this paper is the collective feedback from the campus organizers in respect to their use of the competition as an educational experience in their classrooms. Each University participating uses the competition differently with respect to student assessment and the support students receive. However, all academic campus organizer responses suggest that the competition supports their own and their institutional learning objectives very well. While the project scenarios have varied widely over the years, the intent to challenge 2nd year university (predominantly mechanical) engineering students with an open-ended statement of requirements in a practical and experiential exercise has been a constant. Students are faced with understanding their opportunity and their client’s value system as expressed in a scoring algorithm. They are required to conceive, construct and demonstrate their device with limited prior knowledge and experience, and the learning outcomes clearly impact their appreciation for teamwork, leadership and product realization.

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