Supporting idea generation with design tools: nesting design heuristics within morphological analysis

As some design problems are complex, generating concepts for a complete artefact may be overwhelming for designers, especially for novices. Students often learn to use morphological analysis (MA) to decompose a problem into subcomponents, allowing them to focus on designing for more specific functions. However, generating new ideas for subcomponents remains a challenge for novices. In this study, the authors investigated an educational method combining the morphological analysis approach with a tool designed to facilitate the generation of novel, differing ideas called design heuristics (DH). The results demonstrate that adding design heuristics within morphological analysis supported students in building upon their ideas to generate concepts. These findings contribute to the knowledge about how to facilitate idea generation through supporting tools in design pedagogy and practice

Design Thinking: An Approach with Various Perceptions

Design Thinking has become increasingly popular across different disciplines. However, what it exactly entails is becoming more and more vague, leading to the term being used for many different approaches and applications. This paper presents an interview study with experts on the application and training of Design Thinking in academia and industry. We find a divide with some seeing Design Thinking as a mere toolbox of methods, while others see it as an umbrella term for the mindset that determines how designers think and act. Subjects unanimously attest the approach large potential to support certain types of businesses, when applied under the leadership of trained designers, but see a lot of danger for the approach to become meaningless if it keeps being advertised as an all-purpose problem-solving tool. The interviewees further share extensive experiences on specific success factors and pitfalls in applying Design Thinking in practice

Design Heuristics in ideation across engineering and industrial design domains

How do designers explore a design space to generate diverse solutions? This work focuses on the identification of design heuristics used in the ideation process in the domains of industrial design and engineering design. Design heuristics are cognitive strategies applied to a design problem to help designers create novel solutions. In a think-aloud protocol, engineers and industrial designers with varying levels of experience were asked to develop multiple concepts for a novel design problem. The results show evidence of frequent heuristic use, and that heuristics are effective in generating diverse, creative, and practical concepts, which, as a result, may stimulate higher-quality designs

Overcoming Design Fixation in Idea Generation

Ideally, designers move past existing ideas to create novel designs. But designers often experience “fixation,” where new ideas are similar to existing designs. An example concept in a brief, or early attachment to one’s initial ideas, can limit the range of designs considered. This research study explored the use of “Design Heuristics,” to overcome fixation in a design education setting. Design Heuristics are a set of prompts intended to point designers toward different types of concepts. The 77 prompts are derived from empirical studies of designers, and have been shown to be effective in developing design capability. In the study, novice engineering design students first used brainstorming, and continued to generate more ideas using Design Heuristics . The results showed that ideas created during brainstorming were more similar to initial ideas. Concepts created with Design Heuristics were judged less similar and more creative. This suggests fixation on initial examples can be mitigated by using tools like Design Heuristics during design, which contributes to how educators can help students develop ideation skills

Innovative Solutions through Innovated Problems

Designers are accustomed to solving problems that are provided to them; in fact, common practice in engineering is to present the problem with carefully delineated and detailed constraints required for a promising solution. As a consequence, engineers focus on creating feasible solutions rather than exploring novel perspectives on the presented problems. However, the Engineer of 2020 needs to respond with innovations for multiple and dynamic user needs, diverse users and cultures, and rapidly changing technologies. These complex demands require engineering students to learn that problems are not ‘‘fixed’’ as presented, and to build the habit of exploring alternative perspectives on the stated problem. Creative innovations in problem understanding may lead directly to more innovative solutions. While previous research has documented the ‘‘co-evolution’’ of problem and solution during the design process, the present work aims to understand how designers intentionally explore variants of problems on the way to solutions. Summaries of two empirical studies provide initial evidence about how stated problems are altered within successful solutions in open design challenges, along with evidence of problem think aloud protocols. Analysis of qualitative changes in problem perspectives reveals systematic patterns, or cognitive ‘‘heuristics,’’ and these same patterns are evident as student engineers solve problems. By exploring diverse perspectives on a stated problem, engineers can incorporate innovations into both problems and solutions during the design process

What Problem Are We Solving? Encouraging Idea Generation and Effective Team Communication

Idea generation has frequently been explored in design education as an exercise of students’ “innate” creativity, and few tools or techniques are offered to scaffold ideation ability. As students develop their design skills, we expect them to demonstrate increasing ideation flexibility—a cognitive and social ability to see a problem from multiple perspectives, and to create more varied concepts within the problem space. In this study, we introduced three tools— functional decomposition, Design Heuristics, and affinity diagramming—to aid students’ ideation in a three-hour workshop. Participants included 20 students in a junior industrial design studio arranged in five pre-existing teams. These participants first decomposed the functions within an existing set of concepts they had generated, then selected a specific function and generated additional concepts using the Design Heuristics ideation method. Finally, teams organized these concepts using affinity diagramming to find patterns and additional concepts. Our findings suggest that this process encouraged students to try multiple ways of examining the existing problem space, resulting in a broadened set of final concepts. More striking, the instructional activities served to foreground differences in team members’ understanding of the problem they were addressing, fostering alignment of their problem statement and aiding in its further development

Transforming early concepts with Design Heuristics

Idea development in the early phases of the design process often involves the transformation of initial concepts into more feasible alternatives. However, this important component of design activity is often under-emphasized in design education, and tools to facilitate iteration of designs are limited. This study investigated Design Heuristics as a tool for the further development of initial concepts created by student designers. In a single session, advanced engineering students created initial concepts, and then used Design Heuristics to transform these concepts into alternative designs. The concept sets generated were analyzed, and eight types of transformations were identified, including the enhancement of aesthetics, features, functions, settings, materials, sizes, organizations, and usability. Design Heuristics supported students’ concept development by providing specific suggestions about ways to iterate on their initial concepts. As a result, students explored alternative concepts by producing multiple transformations of their designs, and were more likely to select these transformed concepts as their most creative, unique, and favourite designs

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

How do designers generate new ideas? Design heuristics across two disciplines

Research supports the central role cognitive strategies can play in successful concept generation by individual designers. Design heuristics have been shown to facilitate the creation of new design concepts in the early, conceptual stage of the design process, as well as throughout the development of ideas. However, we know relatively little about their use in differing disciplines. This study examined evidence of design heuristic use in a protocol study with 12 mechanical engineers and 12 industrial designers who worked individually to develop multiple concepts. The open-ended design problem was for a novel product, and the designers’ sketches and comments were recorded as they worked on the problem for 25 min and in a retrospective interview. The results showed frequent use of design heuristics in both disciplines and a significant relationship to the rated creativity of the concepts. Though industrial designers used more heuristics in their concepts, there was a high degree of similarity in heuristic use. Some differences between design disciplines were observed in the choice of design heuristics, where industrial designers showed a greater emphasis on user experience, environmental contexts, and added features. These findings demonstrate the prevalence of design heuristics in individual concept generation and their effectiveness in generating creative concepts, across two design domains

Can experienced designers learn from new tools? A case study of idea generation in a professional engineering team

Generating novel ideas is a challenging part of engineering design, especially when the design task has been undertaken for an extended period of time. How can experienced designers develop new ideas for familiar problems? A tool called Design Heuristicsprovides strategies that support engineers in considering more, and more different, concepts during idea generation. Design Heuristics have been shown to help novice engineers create a set of more diverse and creative candidate concepts. In this case study, we extended this approach to a group of professional engineers who had worked on a specific product line for many years. In a workshop format, a small group of engineers worked with the heuristics in two separate sessions and generated ideas collaboratively. Video recordings were analyzed to reveal how the heuristics were used to stimulate new designs for their product line. We found that Design Heuristics bring order in ideas and elaboration on ideas, perhaps through coordinating effort on idea evaluation, increasing capacity to improve the ideas of others, and facilitating interaction between participants. This case study shows using Design Heuristics can assist even expert engineers to increase the variety of concepts generated, resulting in a larger set of ideas to consider