Information and interaction requirements for software tools supporting analogical design

AbstractOne mode of creative design is for designers to draw analogies that connect the design domain (e.g., a mechanical device) to some other domain from which inspiration is drawn (e.g., a biological system). The identification and application of analogies can be supported by software tools that store, structure, present, or propose source domain stimuli from which such analogies might be constructed. For these tools to be effective and not impact the design process in negative ways, they must fit well with the information and interaction needs of their users. However, the user requirements for these tools are seldom explicitly discussed. Furthermore, the literature that supports the identification of such requirements is distributed across a number of different domains, including those that address analogical design (especially biomimetics), creativity support tools, and human–computer interaction. The requirements that these literatures propose can be divided into those that relate to the information content that the tools provide (e.g., level of abstraction or mode of representation) and those that relate to the interaction qualities that the tools support (e.g., accessibility or shareability). Examining the relationships between these requirements suggests that tool developers should focus on satisfying the key requirements of open-endedness and accessibility while managing the conflicts between the other requirements. Attention to these requirements and the relationships between them promises to yield analogical design support tools that better permit designers to identify and apply source information in their creative work.Dr Gülşen Töre Yargın' s work was supported by the International Post Doctoral Research Fellowship Programme [BİDEB-2219] from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK). Dr Nathan Crilly' s work was supported by an Early Career Fellowship [EP/K008196/1] from the UK s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).This is the accepted manuscript. It will be embargoed until 27/10/2015. The final version is available from CUP at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9673077&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S089006041500007

Becoming original: effects of strategy instruction

Visual arts education focuses on creating original visual art products. A means to improve originality is enhancement of divergent thinking, indicated by fluency, flexibility and originality of ideas. In regular arts lessons, divergent thinking is mostly promoted through brainstorming. In a previous study, we found positive effects of an explicit instruction of metacognition on fluency and flexibility in terms of the generation of ideas, but not on the originality of ideas. Therefore, we redesigned the instruction with a focus on building up knowledge about creative generation strategies by adding more complex types of association, and adding generation through combination and abstraction. In the present study, we examined the effects of this intervention by comparing it with regular brainstorming instruction. In a pretest-posttest control group design, secondary school students in the comparison condition received the brainstorm lesson and students in the experimental condition received the newly developed instruction lesson. To validate the effects, we replicated this study with a second cohort. The results showed that in both cohorts the strategy instruction of 50 min had positive effects on students' fluency, flexibility and originality. This study implies that instructional support in building up knowledge about creative generation strategies may improve students' creative processes in visual arts education

The effect of explicit instructions in idea generation studies

AbstractIn inspiration and fixation experiments, example designs are often provided along with the instructions for how participants should treat them. However, research has not reached a consensus about the influence of such instructions, leading to difficulties in understanding how the examples and the instructions each affect idea generation. We conducted an experiment in which 303 participants designed for the same design problem, while given different examples and instructions, which ranged from strongly encouraging copying the examples to strongly discouraging copying. Exposure to the examples affected the number and type of ideas generated, whereas exposure to the instructions did not. However, instructions did affect how participants incorporated features of the examples in their ideas. Encouraged groups incorporated many features of the examples, while also incorporating structural features more than conceptual ones. Surprisingly, the incorporation of features in discouraged groups was not different from that of groups given no instructions or even no stimulus. This indicates that concrete features may be easier to recognize and reproduce than abstract ones, and that encouraging instructions are more effective than discouraging ones, despite how strict or lenient those instructions are. The manipulation of different features also allowed us to observe how similar approaches to solving a design problem can compete for attention and how the calculation of feature repetition can be misleading depending on how common or obvious the features might be. These findings have implications for the interpretation of results from fixation studies, and for the development of design tools that present stimuli to assist idea generation.</jats:p

Becoming original: effects of strategy instruction

Teaching and Teacher Learning (ICLON

Inspiration and Fixation: The Influences of Example Designs and System Properties in Idea Generation

When tackling problems, designers might be inspired by different sources, whether concrete or abstract. The more concrete sources often comprise representations of potential solutions or examples of existing designs. The more abstract sources often represent the desirable properties of engineered systems, such as modular system architectures. We performed an experiment with 60 novice designers to compare the inspiration effects from these two types of stimuli. Participants were asked to solve a design problem, having been exposed to a concrete example design, an abstract system property, both, or no stimulus at all. Their design work was assessed according to four metrics: fluency, diversity, commonness, and conformity. Exposure to either the example design or the system property reduced the fluency and diversity of ideas, and exposure to both stimuli reduced these measures even further. While there was no difference in the inspiration effects from the example and the property in terms of fluency, diversity, and commonness; results for conformity showed that each stimulus constrained participants differently: encouraging ideas similar to one type of stimulus, while discouraging ideas similar to the other type. In combination with other work on inspiration and fixation, these findings can help shape how design is taught and how inspiration tools are developed.This work was supported by the CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil (BEX 11468/13-0) and the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K008196/1)

Bevorderen van originaliteit: over de effecten van strategie-instructie

Article / Letter to editorICLO

Bevorderen van originaliteit: over de effecten van strategie-instructie

Teaching and Teacher Learning (ICLON

The impact of sources of inspiration on the genesis of creative ideas

Innovation fundamentally begins with a good idea. But where do good ideas come from? Much research suggests that innovative breakthroughs are often inspired by past experience: things and ideas that one has interacted with in the world. However, the same experiences that can inspire innovation can sometimes constrain or harm innovation through focus on previously unsuccessful solutions. In this dissertation, I explore principles for guiding interactions with sources of inspiration (previous/other ideas) to maximize their benefits and minimize their pitfalls, focusing on the role of conceptual distance and diversity of sources. I analyze thousands of ideas for complex innovation challenges (e.g., increasing accessibility in elections, revitalizing struggling urban areas) posted to an online crowd-sourced innovation platform that required contributors to cite sources of ideas, tracing the impact of the distance and diversity of sources in ideas’ conceptual genealogies on their creative success (as judged by an expert panel). In this dissertation, I make three primary contributions to the literature. First, leveraging techniques from natural language processing and machine learning, I develop a validated computational methodology for studying conceptual distance and diversity with complex design concepts, which addresses significant issues of efficiency and scalability faced in prior work. Second, I challenge the widespread but unevenly supported notion that far sources provide the best insights for creative ideation; addressing key methodological issues in prior work (time scale, statistical power, and problem variation), I show that overreliance on far sources can harm ideation success, and that good ideas can often come from very near sources. Finally, I demonstrate the potential value of incorporating a temporal dimension into analyses of the impact of sources of inspiration: I find evidence of differential impacts of source distance and diversity (viz., increased problem variation for the effect of source distance, and a more robust positive effect of source diversity) when considering sources farther back in ideas’ conceptual genealogies

Understanding Conceptual Design Activities: Extended Axiomatic Theory of Design Modeling and Physiological Experimentation

Conceptual design is an early and critical phase of a design process. Decisions made in this stage can affect seventy five percent of the manufacturing costs. Therefore, one of the important factors to successful production is to have methods and tools that enable designers to work more effectively during the phase of conceptual design. To build such methods and tools, knowledge of design activities such as nature of the design process and factors affecting design activities is indispensable. The present thesis is a continuing effort to build a science of design which aims to discover knowledge of design activities through formal scientific process. The contribution of the current thesis includes the extended Axiomatic Theory of Design Modelling and methodologies to study design cognition physiologically. In particular, two postulates were added to the Axiomatic Theory of Design Modelling to support its explanatory power which was demonstrated through the interpretation of the impact of sketching on design performance and the occurrence of design fixation. An integrated experimental environment was developed to collect and analyze physiological signals during design processes. From this environment, several experiments recording physiological signals were conducted and findings of electroencephalography, heart rate variability, and skin conductance were reported

Textual examples in idea generation phase of design process: Creativity and fixation

During the idea generation phase of the design process, designers often search for inspirations in external sources of information, such as photographs, written descriptions and physical examples. These sources have potential to enhance creative performance. However, they sometimes become too attached to particular ideas of external precedents or various examples. It refers to fixation which is identified as inadequate adoption of features from existing examples. Influence of the existing examples on creativity and fixation, specifically textual examples, have been discussed in this research. For the nature of design, researchers highlighted the restructuring process of design problem by new sources because the capabilities and boundaries of design problems are not defined very well. Further, the design problem is not knowable at any specific point. Design knowledge identifies itself by its ambiguity. Many models have been developed for design process. The various numbers of divided phases of the models can be seen as having two main areas: (1) idea generation phase (or “ideation”); (2) later phase for details. Idea generation plays an important role in the design process. It is the area of new and creative configurations on design. Creativity is an integral part of the design process. Designers purpose to achieve original ideas to demonstrate their ability and unique designs. External stimuli or inspirational inputs play important roles to increase creativity. They can support moments of stimulation. Associations between information from memory and external stimuli can contribute to the creation of new meanings. Designers are widely influenced by their surroundings in daily lives. However, each stimulus may not be the part of a more creative result Even if designers want to utilize stimulus as an inspirational source, somehow it may fixate their mind to its surface features and they may lose potential creative contributions of the source. It is called fixation. There is much research that shows significant evidence of conformity effects across the design problems. The given examples to designers may cause higher-level fixation and lower-level creativity or vice versa. Fixation may occur when example solutions are introduced, on the other hand, the designers may create more original ideas as well. There is a need for research to find ways to avoid fixation traps or reduce their adverse impact. Thus, this research focuses on variables of the given example. The following claims show some research areas remained unclear: (1) Some researchers investigated textual examples as - one of the modalities of representation - but did not focus on forms of textual examples. (2) Much research has been conducted with examples which are selected by the researcher. Nevertheless, designers can also choose or produce their own stimuli. There is not much research on this possibility. In this context, my research focuses on the following two variables through two studies (Study 1 and 2): (1) forms of textual examples; (2) self-construction of textual examples. First, most of the studies in the literature have focused on visual presentation and there is not enough research on the content and form of the text. The study of textual examples has still not been awarded enough attention especially as various forms of text. Some forms of text are as follows: keyword, paragraph, sentence, poem. These observations lead me to the following research question: Which forms of textual example increase creativity and reduce fixation more? (Study 1). Second, most of the studies regarding textual examples have used prose or keywords. The poems have been ignored. However, poems imply more meaning with fewer words. The structure of the poems enables more creative narratives than structure of prose. Because unusual organization of words stimulates the readers and draws their attention. This activates the creative performance of the reader. The surrealist poem is the extreme form of this activation. It is random assemblies with headlines and sentences which is cut from newspapers. Thus, novel meaning networks are formed. The method of creating a surrealist poem offers a new way of getting inspiration. It is termed as self-construction practice by this research. Through this method, designers create their own example from the given one. Reconstruction of the text may increase the creative process and prevent fixations from the given text. This suggestion led me to the following research question: If the designers write their own poem instead of a given poem (as a self-construction practice), can they internalize the textual example? In addition, does it produce more creative and less fixated designs? (Study 2). Two experimental studies were planned to partially answer the research questions, in which novice students of architecture were asked to solve two different design problems, under different conditions. All of the experimental sessions were conducted in a design education studio. The participants produced sketches and added a written explanation relating to their designs. Fluency, flexibility and repetition of key attributes were calculated by the researcher. Originality, practicality, understanding of the task and quality were ranked by judges. Study 1 shows us tendencies of using various textual forms. Distinctions of keywords and of poems have appeared among them. This emphasizes the role of keyword and poem in the design process as inspirational sources and provides many tips for their potential use. The keyword also leads to a high degree of fixation. However, a low degree of fixation is observed when poems are presented as inspirational examples. In Study 2, the self-constructed poem seems to support develop more successful design ideas from many perspectives. In the context of the surrealist poem, writing and reading the surrealist poem trigger the designers’ imagination. At first, the words and lines of poems seem unrelated to each other and designers try to relate them and solve the puzzle of meaning. Hence, novel meaning networks are formed. It indicates that surrealist poems are able to activate the creative performance of the designers. Writing their own surrealist poems ,as a self-construction practice, motivated designers to begin to produce by having fun. Motivated designers have stimulated themselves to produce creative ideas. In other words, the self-construction process may be added to the design process models in the earlier part of the idea generation phase which is called as pre-design and warm-up phase. This earlier phase makes designers highly motivated and they internalized the given examples. Following the conclusions, several implications and recommendations for the design process and education are discussed