Experimental Investigation of Progressive Idea Generation Techniques in Engineering Design

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jami J. Shah
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Investigation ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Generation Process ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Design Fixation ◽  
Work In Progress ◽  
Collaborative Sketching

Abstract Three idea generation methods for engineering design have been studied over a period of several years. They are Method 6-3-5, Collaborative Sketching (C-Sketch), and the Gallery Method. Common features of all three methods are that they are team based and ideas are generated and developed in progressive stages. Differences between them include the medium for recording and communication allowed between team members. Experiments have been conducted on the influence of these factors on the idea generation process and results. Data from idea generation methods from 3 sets of experiments has been collected and partially analyzed. Specific issues examined are (a) overcoming design fixation (b) sentential vs. diagrammatic recording of ideas (c) misinterpretation of idea description as a provocative stimulus (d) identification of creative exploratory processes during design sessions. Results of work in progress are presented based on over 200 hours of data from roughly 44 subjects over nearly 3 years.

Design Ideation Through Speculative Fiction: Foundational Principles and Exploratory Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 143 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maulik C. Kotecha ◽  
Ting-Ju Chen ◽  
Daniel A. McAdams ◽  
Vinayak Krishnamurthy
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
User Interfaces ◽  
Divergent Thinking ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Practical Case ◽  
Generation Process ◽  
Design Ideation

Abstract The objective of this study is to position speculative fiction as a broader framework to stimulate, facilitate, and study engineering design ideation. For this, we first present a comprehensive and detailed review of the literature on how fiction, especially science fiction, has played a role in design and decision-making. To further strengthen the need for speculative fiction for idea stimulation, we further prototype and study a prototype workflow that utilizes excerpts from speculative fiction books as textual stimuli for design ideation. Through a qualitative study of this workflow, we gain insights into the effect of textual stimuli from science fiction narratives on design concepts. Our study reveals that the texts consisting of the terms from the design statement or closely related to the problem boost the idea generation process. We further discover that less directly related stimuli may encourage out-of-the-box and divergent thinking. Using the insights gained from our study, we pose critical questions to initiate speculative fiction-based design ideation as a new research direction in engineering design. Subsequently, we discuss current research directions and domains necessary to take the technical, technological, and methodological steps needed for future research on design methodologies based on speculative fictional inspiration. Finally, we present a practical case to demonstrate how an engineering design workflow could be operationalized by investigating a concrete example of the design of automotive user interfaces (automotive-UI) through the lens of speculative fiction.

Physical Models and Design Thinking: A Study of Functionality, Novelty and Variety of Ideas

2012 ◽  
Vol 134 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vimal K. Viswanathan ◽  
Julie S. Linsey
Keyword(s):  
Mental Models ◽  
New Product Development ◽  
Design Thinking ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Physical Models ◽  
Generation Process ◽  
Building Conditions ◽  
Design Fixation ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Variety Show

Engineering idea generation is a crucial part of new product development, and physical modeling is a widely used tool. Despite the physical models’ popularity in the idea generation process, little is known about their effects on design cognition. The existing literature provides contradicting guidelines about their use in the design process. Product design firms call for the frequent use of physical models, but some studies suggest that physical models induce design fixation. The psychological literature indicates that physical representations, by supporting designers’ mental models of physical phenomena, might lead to more feasible designs. The advantages and disadvantages of physical models as idea generation tools need to be clarified to help designers decide when and where to implement them. Based on prior studies and anecdotal evidence, two hypotheses are tested: (1) physical models supplement designer’s mental models and (2) physical models induce design fixation. Two between-subject idea generation experiments with novice designers are conducted to evaluate these hypotheses. In the first pilot experiment, the participants generate ideas in three conditions: sketching only, building, and building and testing. This study is followed by a second experiment, in which a new condition called constrained sketching is added. In each condition, participants use the representation implied by the name of the condition. The percentage of ideas satisfying all design requirements indicates the physical models’ effect on the designers’ mental models. Novelty and variety are used as metrics for design fixation. The percentage of functional ideas quantified shows significant variation across the sketching and building conditions, whereas novelty and variety show no differences. These results support the argument that physical models supplement novice designer’s mental models. No evidence of fixation is observed, which contradicts the results of the prior observational studies. Hypothesized reasons for the apparently contradictory results are also presented.

Representing analogies to influence fixation and creativity: A study comparing computer-aided design, photographs, and sketches

2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olufunmilola Atilola ◽  
Julie Linsey
Keyword(s):  
Computer Aided Design ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Generation Process ◽  
Critical Question ◽  
Design Fixation ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Computer Aided ◽  
Aided Design ◽  
Effective Design

AbstractMany tools are being developed to assist designers in retrieving analogies. One critical question these designers face is how these analogues should be represented in order to minimize design fixation and maximize idea generation. To address this question, an experiment is presented that compares various representations' influence on creativity and design fixation. This experiment presents an effective example (analogue) as computer-aided design (CAD), sketch, or photograph representations. We found that all representations induced fixation, and the degree of fixation did not vary significantly. We also found that CAD representations encourage engineering designers to identify and copy the key effective features of the example. CAD and photo representations also produced a higher quality of design concepts. Results from this experiment offer insights into how these various representations may be used in examples during idea generation; CAD representations appear to offer the greatest advantages during the idea generation process. The results from this experiment also indicate that analogical databases of effective design examples should include CAD and photolike images of the analogue rather than sketches.

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.

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.

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.

Collaborative Sketching (C-Sketch) - An Idea Generation Technique for Engineering Design

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 168-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMI J. SHAH ◽  
NOE VARGAS-HERNANDEZ ◽  
JOSHUA D. SUMMERS ◽  
SANTOSH KULKARNI
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Generation Technique ◽  
Collaborative Sketching

Utilizing EEG to Explore the Mental States Involved in the Occurrence of Different Levels Design Fixation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Cao ◽  
Wu Zhao ◽  
Xin Guo ◽  
Tingting Wu
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Bias ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Mental Effort ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Mental Fatigue ◽  
Generation Process ◽  
Design Fixation ◽  
Creative Idea ◽  
Comparison Results ◽  
Different Levels

Abstract Design fixation, which is a form of cognitive bias, is commonly reported to unconsciously occur when designers take the path of least resistance during the fulfillment of a design task. It’s thought to be easy and effortless. Nonetheless, the mental states such as mental effort and mental fatigue that accompany the occurrence of different levels of design fixation are still unknown. In the present study, an experiment using electroencephalography (EEG) was conducted to examine the mental effort and mental fatigue involved in the occurrence of different levels of design fixation during creative idea generation. Fluency, flexibility, the degree of copying, and the time spent generating ideas were used to evaluate the design performance and fixation level of each participant, and the task-related power changes of theta, alpha, and beta bands of participants with higher and lower levels of fixation during creative idea generation process were compared and analyzed separately. The comparison results revealed that participants with higher levels of design fixation made the less mental effort and showed higher levels of mental fatigue during the ideation process compared to those with lower levels of design fixation. These results provide additional evidence for the mental states involved in the occurrence of design fixation and could contribute to a deeper understanding of design fixation from the neuroscience perspective.

Idea generation with Technology Semantic Network

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Serhad Sarica ◽  
Binyang Song ◽  
Jianxi Luo ◽  
Kristin L. Wood
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Semantic Network ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Semantic Distance ◽  
The Core ◽  
Design Idea ◽  
Design Ideas ◽  
Design Ideation

Abstract There are growing efforts to mine public and common-sense semantic network databases for engineering design ideation stimuli. However, there is still a lack of design ideation aids based on semantic network databases that are specialized in engineering or technology-based knowledge. In this study, we present a new methodology of using the Technology Semantic Network (TechNet) to stimulate idea generation in engineering design. The core of the methodology is to guide the inference of new technical concepts in the white space surrounding a focal design domain according to their semantic distance in the large TechNet, for potential syntheses into new design ideas. We demonstrate the effectiveness in general, and use strategies and ideation outcome implications of the methodology via a case study of flying car design idea generation.

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