TESTING DESIGN STIMULI FOR DESIGN-BY-ANALOGY ON A LARGE SET OF DESIGNERS

This paper presents evidence supporting the hypothesis that, for designers not specifically trained in designing-by-analogy, the sources of inspiration that share the same (sub-functions) and context of the target system lead to ideas having higher novelty and quality. The exploration of the design space gets positively affected as well. These evidence emerge after the statistical analysis of the results of an experiment that involved 84 graduate students in Mechanical Engineering, with typical competencies on engineering design, but without any specific skill on analogy-based idea generation

What surprised you? A questionnaire to map unexpectedness through FBS variables

The paper presents the analysis of an original online survey that aims at checking the factors triggering surprise in randomly chosen evaluators who were submitted a set of surprising products. The authors use the answers to check the capability of a situated FBS-based model to help catch the main factors triggering surprise in products, here seen as a mismatch between what is interpreted and previously conceived expectations. The survey questionnaire shows to be effective in grabbing surprising factors and the results demonstrate that the model allows a strong ex-post convergence in the investigation of surprising factors

Editorial for the Special Issue "Requirements in Design Processes: Open Issues, Relevance and Implications"

Requirements play a key role in the design process by affecting analysis, synthesis and evaluation activities at different levels and in different ways [...