A Validation Study of Disability Simulation Suit Usage as a Proxy for Customer Need Statements From Persons With Disabilities

Current product design methodologies do not typically address the creation of inclusive products (products that meet the needs of persons with and without disabilities). In this paper, empathic design principles and modular product design strategies are explored as part of a novel approach to inclusive design. The use of disability simulation as a data collection methodology both increases the safety and ease by which customer needs can be gathered and gives designers an empathic design experience with the products they develop. A disability simulation suit is designed to support empathic gathering of customer needs. The suit is subjected to validation trials to determine how accurately it mimics the physical and perceptual behaviors of persons with disabilities in users of the suit. Initial results show that the disability simulation suit provides a valid empathic design experience that yields similar customer needs and reduced dexterity as persons with disabilities.

Considering Different Motivations in Design for Consumer-Behavior Change

Much existing work aims to understand how to change human behavior through product-design interventions. Given the diversity of individuals and their motivations, solutions that address different motives are surprisingly rare. We aim to develop and validate a framework that clearly identifies and targets different types of behavioral motives in users. We present a behavior model comprising egoistic, sociocultural and altruistic motives, and apply the model to sustainable behavior. We confirmed the explanatory power of the behavior model by categorizing user comments about an international environmental agreement from multiple news sources. We next developed concepts, each intended to target a single motive type, and elicited evaluations from online respondents who self-assessed their motivation type after evaluating the concepts. We present and discuss correlation results between motive types and preference for products that target these types for two iterations of the experiment. Deviations from our expected results are mainly due to unexpected perceptions, both positive and negative, of our concepts. Despite this, the main value of this work lies in the explicit consideration of a manageable number of different types of motives. A proposed design tool incorporates the three types of motives from the model with the different levels of persuasion others have proposed to change user behavior.

The Effects of Elaboration in Creativity Tests as it Pertains to Overall Scores and How it Might Prevent a Person From Thinking of Creative Ideas During the Early Stages of Brainstorming and Idea Generation

Previous studies have found that the first few ideas we think of for a given prompt are likely to be less original than the later ideas. In this study, 460 participants were given the Alternative Uses Test (AUT) where they were asked to list alternative uses for a paperclip, creating a database of 235 unique answers, each having a relative occurrence rate in that pool. It was found that later responses were significantly more novel than early responses and on average the originality of responses exponentially increased with quantity. A closer look at this data reveals that a person is likely to have a lower overall originality score if he or she has more elaborate responses. 89 of these participants were also given the Abbreviated Torrance Test For Adults (ATTA) and the data from both tests was used to study relationships between elaboration, fluency, and originality. The data from the AUT reveals a strong negative correlation between an individual’s average number of words per response and his or her average originality score. It is hypothesized that people who spend more time writing multiple-word responses have less time to generate many different ideas thus hindering their ability to reach the novel ideas. Similarly, the ATTA reveals that after two extraneous details, elaboration on a drawing will negatively impact fluency and originality scores. This is not to say that elaborate ideas cannot be original, but rather that in time-limited situations, elaboration may hinder the production of original ideas. In applying this to real world problem solving and idea generation, it is suggested that people may prevent themselves from finding creative solutions if too much time is spent on discussing the first few suggested ideas from a brainstorming session. It is suggested that a more effective brainstorming session will delay discussion until a significant number of ideas are generated.

Gene Transcription and Translation in Design

An organism grows from very small to the whole body, while an engineering product is assembled from elements. An organism is formed autonomously and adaptable to his/her/its environment, while an engineering product can only execute very limited actions. The formation of a product determines its functionality. Nature is the best teacher for learning how structures are formed for specific functionality. This paper compares the design process with the developmental process of embryo and proposes a qualitative development framework that simulates the gene transcription and translation in biology. The key step in design is transforming behaviors to structures. This is a process from information to the form and it bears some similarity with the process from DNA to the protein in embryogenesis. Three basic steps are required from DNA to the protein: gene transcription, transport and protein synthesis, which is named as gene expression. Key mechanisms contributing to this transformation process are investigated and a qualitative development framework are constructed for a growth design process. Simple examples are presented for illustration of proposed methods.

An Agent-Based Approach to Synthesizing Structures

This paper discusses a new method for the automated synthesis of structures. By creating a framework to implement the synthesis, several methods are compared for the application of building tall self-supporting towers. These towers are evaluated in a physics simulation and comprised of multiple nodes and connections. In this paper, a new agent-based method is compared to existing search methods including random search, A*, and Hill-Climbing search. With the agents making local changes to nodes in the tower, the method achieves better results with less time and memory.

Camels and Fennec Foxes: A Case Study on Biologically Inspired Design of Sand Traction Systems

This paper presents a demonstration of how biological solutions to mobility in the desert can be used to drive new concepts for sand-traction tires. Biological inspiration is used to translate both camel hooves (shape) and Fennec Fox paw texture (material) into design concepts for tire traction that are prototyped and tested. The steps used in this are captured in a case study of bio-inspired design, with the resulting concepts compared in terms of their performance. It was found that the camel hoof inspired “concave” shaped tire improved traction that the Fennec Fox paw textured “miner’s moss” surface on tires improved traction, and that the integrated solution of the two also improved traction. The greatest improvement was seen with the Fennec Fox textured concepts. Recommendations are made for improvements to steps of bio-inspiration for ideation and future traction concepts.

In Search of Effective Design Problems for Design Research

Much design theory research seeks to create, evaluate, improve or optimize design methods. Whether that research focuses on design thinking, tools, methods, or education, short design problems are often provided to participants in order to evaluate the effects of the variables being tested. When designing and creating such problems, certain characteristics may influence design outcomes: experience and exposure to the design problems vary between participants, and each problem may be more or less favorable to the controlled variable. In this paper we conjecture a small set of design problem characteristics that may influence experimental outcomes, and we discuss two experiments targeted at uncovering this influence. In our first experiment we examine differences in evaluation metrics between two design problems. In a follow up experiment we correlate the hypothesized characteristics to the variances in experiment outcome. These early results assist to further compare and contrast the empirical differences in common evaluation metrics, as well as show how familiarity and extent of the subjects’ knowledge of a design problem influence these metrics. We also expose the potential for interaction between the design method and the design problem.

Informing Early Design via Crowd-Based Co-Creation

Customer inputs in the early stages of design can potentially lead to completely new outlooks in concept generation. We propose crowd-based co-creation as a means to this end. Our main idea is to think of the customer as a source of initial design concepts rather than a means for obtaining preferences towards designer-generated concepts. For analyzing a large collection of customer-created prototypes, we develop a framework that focuses on generating hypotheses related to customer perception of design attributes. We demonstrate our approach through a web interface to gather design requirements for a computer mouse, a bicycle seat, a pen holder, and a cola bottle. This interface was used in a crowdsourcing study with 253 users who represented potential end users for these products. Results from this study show that web-based co-creation allows designers to capture a variety of form and function-related design requirements from user-created virtual prototypes. We also found that such studies can be instrumental in identifying innovative product concepts, and gaining insights about how user perception correlates with product form. Therefore, we make the case that customer creation through distributed co-creation platforms can reinforce concept exploration in future early design processes.

Empirical Studies of Functional Decomposition in Early Design

This paper explores functional decomposition in early design. In the first part of this study, we explore how the three most common methods (top-down, energy-flow, enumeration) affect concept generation for novice design teams (n=25). We found that nearly all the features in the final concept could be mapped to the function diagram, though not all the functions mapped to the actual concept. This suggests that there is not much change in system functionality between these two phases, despite being separated by a few weeks. We also found that teams who used top-down and energy-flow performed nearly the same, and teams who used enumeration performed worse than those who used energy-flow. Based on these results, we recommend using either top-down or energy-flow, but not enumeration in early design. We also observed that teams used the diagramming process to reach a consensus and support team communication. The second part of this study evaluates design reports (n=78) from industry engineers taking a distance learning design course. Even though roughly half of the reports used functional decomposition, there was no correlation between using functional decomposition and final design quality as measured by various grade components. We also observed that half of the function diagrams were tree diagrams. This supports prior findings that a top-down, tree-based approach is more intuitive for engineers. Together, these results suggest that functional decomposition is helpful for team communication, but show no direct correlation with design outcome. We also recommend training strategies for teaching decomposition based on differences between the two datasets.

Exploring the Relationship Between Excess and System Evolutions Using a Stress-Test

Engineers understand that attaining a full service life can add value to an engineered system. Ensuring that this is possible requires that excess be embedded within the design to enable system evolution when new or changed requirements are placed on it during the service phase. However, since future needs are by definition unknown, knowing with certainty which excesses to embed is impossible. To address that challenge, this paper draws on an excess mapping method developed in previous work that demonstrated how to map component relationships based on excess interactions. This method is now used in a stress test approach to explore how a system design is affected when faced with various possible evolution scenarios. This study has two results: first, a judgment of whether the current system design possesses sufficient excess for it to respond to future needs. Second, quantitative estimates of excesses to add if the current design excess is judged to be insufficient. A demonstrative example is presented using a dart gun, which determines that the system as designed is likely adequate for a variety of possible future needs.