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