The Role of Personality and Team-Based Product Dissection on Fixation Effects

D esign fixation has been found to be complex in its definition and expression, but it plays an important role in design idea generation. Identifying the factors that influence fixation is crucial in understanding how to enhance the design process and reduce the negative effects of fixation. One way to potentially mitigate fixation is through product dissection activities since this activity has been shown to increase creativity and design space exploration in engineering design. However, product dissection has not been studied in the context of design fixation, so it is unclear if, or how, this type of activity influences fixation. Additionally, although prior work studied product dissection in a team environment, it did not examine how individual factors such as personality attributes influence one’s involvement or exposure to the activity. Therefore, this study explores the role of product dissection and personality traits on design fixation in an engineering design classroom setting. Our results show that product dissection can reduce fixation effects when students are actively engaged in the activity. However, individual personality attributes can influence one\u27s engagement in a team-based dissection activity and thus, can serve to reduce the positive impact of product dissection. These findings demonstrate a relationship between personality and active engagement in product dissection activities, and also indicate product dissection as a way to mitigate fixation effects in engineering design education. The results from this study can be used to enhance our understanding of the design process, and help reduce fixation effects in the engineering classroom

Cyber Collaboratory-based Sustainable Design Education: A Pedagogical Framework

Educators from across the educational spectrum are faced with challenges in delivering curricula that address sustainability issues. This article introduces a cyber-based interactive e-learning platform, entitled the Sustainable Product Development Collaboratory, which is focused on addressing this need. This collaboratory aims to educate a wide spectrum of learners in the concepts of sustainable design and manufacturing by demonstrating the effects of product design on supply chain costs and environmental impacts. In this paper, we discuss the overall conceptual framework of this collaboratory along with pedagogical and instructional methodologies related to collaboratory-based sustainable design education. Finally, a sample learning module is presented along with methods for assessment of student learning and experiences with the collaboratory

Understanding the Impact of Subjective Uncertainty on Architecture Generation and Supplier Identification

International audienceThe Architecture & Supplier Identification Tool (ASIT) is a design support tool, which enables identification of the most suitable architectures and suppliers in early stages of complex systems design, with consideration of overall requirements satisfaction and uncertainty. During uncertainty estimation, several types of uncertainties that are essential in early design (i.e., uncertainty of modules due to new technology integration, compatibility between modules, and supplier performance uncertainty) have been considered in ASIT. However, it remains unclear whether expert estimation uncertainties should be taken into account. From one perspective, expert estimation uncertainties may significantly influence the overall uncertainty since early complex systems design greatly depends on expert estimation; while an opposing perspective argues that expert estimation uncertainties should be neglected because they are relatively much smaller in scale. In order to understand how expert estimation uncertainties (especially subjective uncertainty) influence the architecture and supplier identification results achieved through ASIT, a comprehensive study of possible modelling approaches has been discussed; and type-1 fuzzy sets and 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic representation are selected to integrate subjective uncertainties into ASIT. A powertrain design case is used to compare results between considering subjective uncertainties and not considering them. Finally, the consideration of subjective uncertainty in early conceptual design as well as other design stages is discussed

The Impact of Product Dissection Activities on the Novelty of Design Outcomes

This paper explores the effect of a product dissection activity on design novelty in engineering design. Novelty is an important aspect of design ideation effectiveness. Therefore, identifying the factors that influence novelty will expand the understanding of the design process, as well as improve design pedagogy. Previous studies have found that participation in product dissection activities positively impacted creativity, but did not study creativity in terms of novelty, making it unclear if product dissection activities will impact the novelty of generated designs. Furthermore, although product dissection has been studied in team environments, individual factors such as the personality traits of the team members was not explored for their effect on the exposure to the dissection activity, and hence the effect on the novelty of generated designs. Our empirical experimentation showed that extraverted participants had a higher level of exposure to the body design dissection activity and developed more novel ideas than those who were not extraverts. These results contribute to our understanding on how team-based dissection activities influence the novelty of generated designs in an engineering design setting

The Impact of Team-Based Product Dissection on Design Novelty

Although design novelty is a critical area of research in engineering design, most research in this space has focused on understanding and developing formal idea generation methods instead of focusing on the impact of current design practices. This is problematic because formal techniques are often not adopted in industry due to the burdensome steps often included in these methods, which limit the practicality and adoption of these methods. This study seeks to understand the impact of product dissection, a design method widely utilized in academia and industry, on design novelty in order to produce recommendations for the use or alterations of this method for supporting novelty in design. To investigate the impact of dissection, a study was conducted with 76 engineering students who completed a team-based dissection of an electric toothbrush and then individually generated ideas. The relationships between involvement in the dissection activity, the product dissected, the novelty and quantity of the ideas developed were investigated. The results reveal that team members who were more involved in the dissection activity generated concepts that were more novel than those who did not. In addition, the type of the dissected product also had an influence on design novelty. Finally, a positive correlation between the number of ideas generated and the novelty of the design concepts was identified. The results from this study are used to provide recommendations for leveraging product dissection for enhancing novelty in engineering design education and practice

Observations from radical innovation projects considering the company context

International audienceThe development of product-service innovation projects within the context of a company is not yet supported by clear theories and methodologies. Our objective is to analyze innovation and idea generation for such projects from the fuzzy front end to the selected design concept, assessing their potential to be successfully developed and launched on the market. We present a protocol study, using which data derived from 19 innovation projects of five types and conducted by 86 students are analyzed. Sixty-one variables are observed, thus generating 700 data vectors. Bayesian network learning is used to explore conditional inferences among these variables. We examine conditional probabilities between the innovation process means and the significant results produced for the company, modulated by the influence of contextual variables. A number of surprising findings are drawn about the link between problem setting and problem solving processes, the importance of certain contextual variables, and the potential discrepancies between the apparent and produced results of innovative projects. Conducted analyses imply the need for novel innovation evaluation frameworks

Managing uncertainty in potential supplier identification

International audienceAs a benefit of modularization of complex systems, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) can choose suppliers in a less constricted way when faced with new or evolving requirements. Before a supplier is selected for each module, a group of potential suppliers should be identified in order to control the uncertainty along with other performance measures of the new system development. In modular design, because suppliers are more involved in system development, the potential supplier identification should be combined with potential architecture identification to manage uncertainty as well as requirements satisfaction level by potential suppliers. In this paper, we propose an Architecture & Supplier Identification Tool (ASIT), which generates all possible architectures and corresponding suppliers based on new requirements through matrix-mapping and propagation. Using ASIT, the overall uncertainty and requirements satisfaction of generated architectures can be estimated. The proposed method aims at providing decision support for the early design stage and thereby helping companies to have an integrated view of suppliers and system architectures to better satisfy customer requirements and reduce risk