Enhancing creativity through Biological Stimuli during new products ideation

The development of new and innovative products consists in a competitive advantage, allowing companies to overcome competitors, maintain or even increase its market share. As the product development cycle is shortening, a greater effort is required at the ideation of new technologies and products. In this context, the bio-inspired design has been receiving attention as a creativity strengthening method. However, the majority of methods and tools proposed in this field present biological stimuli in the form of literature extracts, requiring a great cognitive effort from the design teams in abstracting principles to generate ideas. In this paper a systematic approach to biological stimuli development is presented, as well as its contribution during the ideation process. An experiment was conducted on the context of a product design course. As result, it was evidenced that the biological stimulators contributed to the increase of the ideas\u27 utility and variety, favoring the innovation process

How do financial constraints affect creativity?

This paper investigates the effects of financial constraints on the outcome of different types of creative tasks such as product ideation and product repair. Four experimental studies examine the effect of financial constraints on creativity of the outcome of a product ideation task, and compare the effect of financial constraints with the effect of another type of constraint (i.e., input restrictions) on creativity of products ideated and on the amount of resources invested in the development of the creative solution. Furthermore, these studies explore the type of creative process ignited by financial constraints and analyze the effect of financial constraints in interaction with an individual difference such as novelty seeking, which embraces more remote determinants of creative performance, on the creativity of the outcomes to a product ideation task, as well as on the creativity of the outcomes to a more constrained task such as repairing an existing product. The results suggest that constrained financial resources may be beneficial to creativity. Financial constraints lead to the ideation of more creative products. Yet these products are generated using fewer inputs and a lower budget than products generated in an unconstrained condition. Furthermore, while yielding outcomes as creative as the ones generated under input constraints, financial constraints induce a parsimonious mindset reflected in the use of less costly resources. More interestingly, financial constraints activate a top-down rather than a bottom-up processing strategy in approaching the creative task. Finally, the results show that the effect of financial constraints is stronger for individuals with inherent tendencies toward novelty seeking, because their stock of experiences and perspectives puts them under stress when facing an unconstrained problem space. This interaction effect holds not only for product ideation tasks, but also when the problem space is already constrained in nature, as in the case of repairing a product. These findings, which are quite counterintuitive from the perspective of classic new product development literature, suggest that, at least under certain conditions, the use of financial constraints might constitute a promising approach to foster new ideas' generation, one that leads to more creative outcomes despite using less costly inputs. In addition, our results suggest that, when dealing with a creative task, companies should modulate the adoption of this kind of constraint on the individual characteristics of their employees, specifically on their innate tendency to seek novelty

Engineering design concept generation: The effect of concept combination and classification

World economic forum reported that creativity is one of the most sought after skills by employers globally. Preliminary research lead to multiple initiatives on enhancing creativity and innovation. To contribute in this field, we investigated the effect of two interventions on the creativity of undergraduate engineering students, particularly on engineering design concept generation. The primary focus of this investigation was on assessing the effect of two interventions, combining and classifying concepts, on the originality and quantity of the concepts produced. In this research, we used the Decision Tree for Originality Assessment in Design (DTOAD) as a measure of concept originality. Statistical analysis showed that both the combine and the classify interventions lead to concept generation with higher originality. We also found that students produced higher number of the radically different concept, i.e. concepts with originality score 7.5 and above, however this effect was observed in all the test groups. These interventions made improvements and thus can be encouraged as a part of an ideation or an engineering problem solving task in the undergraduate engineering education to help the students develop creative skills

How the design of socio-technical experiments can enable radical changes for sustainability

Sustainability requires radical innovations, but their introduction and diffusion usually encounter the opposition of existing socio-technical regimes. An important challenge is, therefore, to understand how to catalyse and support the process of transitioning towards these innovations. Building upon insights from transition studies (in particular the concepts of Strategic Niche Management and Transition Management), and through an action research project (aimed at designing, introducing and diffusing a sustainable mobility system in the suburban areas of Cape Town), the paper investigates the role of design in triggering and orienting societal transformations. A key role is given to the implementation of socio-technical experiments. A new socio-technical system design role emerges: a role in which the ideation and development of sustainable innovation concepts is coupled with the designing of appropriate transition paths to gradually incubate, introduce and diffuse these concepts

How do Design Heuristics Affects Outcomes?

How do designers explore design solution spaces? The typical paradigm underlying design education is project-based learning focusing on solving design problems. However, this learning approach provides open-ended design tasks for students to work on through the entire process of design. It assumes a high level of independent learning within the specific project context, and require students to transfer lessons learned to new design problems [Pietersen 2002]. When students later face a new unstructured, ambiguous design problem, they may find it challenging to apply lessons from prior project experiences. The critique method is often used to help students think more critically about their work; however, it does not provide training on how to make use of the experience in later design tasks. How do students successfully learn to address design problems? An important stage in the design process is “ideation,” which, when successful, entails applying creative thinking skills to generate novel solutions. Designers often experience limitations in generating diverse concepts [Bruseberg and McDonagh-Philp 2002]. In design pedagogy, the need for divergent thinking (generating many, varied possible solutions) is well recognized; however, instructors often do not have specific strategies about how to generate designs to teach to their students. Creative tools would help designers to generate more creative and diverse ideas during design. In previous work, we identified successful creative strategies in the fields of engineering design and industrial design [Yilmaz et al. 2010], [Yilmaz and Seifert 2010], [Yilmaz and Seifert 2011]. When tested with engineering students, the “Design Heuristics” were shown to improve the creativity of resulting designs and to produce more variety in the designs generated [Daly et al. 2011]. In the present study, we tested whether providing Design Heuristics to industrial design students would improve their design outcomes

A Methodical Approach to Support Conceptual Design for Multi-Material Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing (AM) opens new possibilities for innovative product designs. However, due to a lack of knowledge and restrained creativity because of design fixations, design engineers do not take advantage of AM's design freedom. Especially multi-material AM provides new opportunities for functional integration that hardly considered in ideation. To overcome barriers in the development of solution ideas and utilizing such new design potentials, new design methods and tools are needed. Therefore, in this contribution, a methodological approach for a function-oriented provision of solution principles specific to material extrusion is presented. A tool is developed to facilitate effective guidance in developing solution ideas and to foster a realistic concretization by providing a combination of opportunistic and restrictive AM knowledge. Besides general levers of AM, process-specific design opportunities support the design engineers in exploiting AM's potentials, especially those who are not familiar with Design for AM. Finally, the applicability of the methodological approach is evaluated in an academic study by means of redesigning a hand prosthesis with a grab function

Investigating the Impacts of Design Heuristics on Idea Initiation and Development

This paper presents an analysis of engineering students’ use of Design Heuristics as part of a team project in an undergraduate engineering design course. Design Heuristics are an empirically derived set of cognitive “rules of thumb” for use in concept generation. We investigated heuristic use in the initial concept generation phase, whether heuristic-inspired concepts were carried through to later design process stages, and how concept synthesis within each team’s design process related to heuristic use. The results reveal widespread use of Design Heuristics among the concepts generated by individuals and selected by teams for further development, and a prevalence of concept synthesis within approximately half of the observed teams’ design processes