An Empirical Study on the Impact of Design Brief Information on the Creativity of Design Outcomes With Consideration of Gender and Gender Diversity

This study aims to understand how information in design briefs affects the creativity of design outcomes. We tested this during a Collaborative Sketching (C-Sketch) ideation exercise with first-year undergraduate student designers. We focus on four types of stimuli—quantitative requirements, a visual example (video), a physical example, and contextual information—and we measure creativity according to three metrics—novelty, appropriateness, and usability with either the participants’ gender or the gender diversity of the participants’ groups. The findings suggest that the main effect of providing a video example results in high appropriateness and usability scores but low novelty scores and that physical-contextual briefs have high novelty and usability scores. In addition, we did not find any correlation between gender or gender diversity and creativity scores.

Improving Virtual Design Team Performance Through Use of a Collaborative Sketching Application

As virtual teamwork in engineering becomes more central to the daily design activities of organizations around the world, it is increasingly important for team members to be able to easily and effectively share their visual ideas with remote teammates. However, sharing visual representations of ideas among virtual teammates is generally difficult and commonly hampered by various factors, making the process time-consuming and non-intuitive. In laboratory experiments and a case study, involving students from six different universities across the U.S. working as teams to build unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the authors quantify how a collaborative sketching application (CSA) provides a significant benefit to design engineering activities for virtual teams. From the experiments and the case study, it was observed that such a tool improved users' understanding of each other's ideas when working in a virtual setting, improved the perceived equality of teammate contribution, and decreased the level of frustration experienced when working remotely.

Collaborative Sketching With skWiki: A Case Study

Sketching for conceptual design has traditionally been performed on paper. Recent computational tools for conceptual design have leveraged the availability of hand-held computing devices and web-based collaborative platforms. Further, digital sketching interfaces have the added advantages of storage, duplication, and sharing on the web. We have developed skWiki, a tool that enables collaborative sketching on digital tablets using a web-based framework. We evaluate skWiki in two contexts, (a) as a collaborative ideation tool, and (b) as a design research tool. For this evaluation, we perform a longitudinal study of an undergraduate design team that used skWiki over the course of the concept generation and development phase of their course project. Our analysis of the team’s sketching activity indicated instances of lateral and vertical transformation between participants, indicating collaborative exploration of the breadth and depth of the design space. Using skWiki for this evaluation also demonstrated it to be an effective research tool to investigate such collaborative design processes.