Elies Dekoninck

Reuse of ideas and concepts for creative stimuli in engineering design

Creative idea generation is essential to novel concept development and ultimately innovation. The following paper describes an extensive industry-based study investigating the use of creative stimuli during a brainstorming session at the conceptual stages of design. A new approach to retrieving creative stimuli referred to as ‘Sweeper’ is proposed, which sources stimuli internal to a companys information repository. This creative stimuli tool is then compared to other creative stimuli tools using objective, industrially grounded performance criteria. This study provides an arguably much needed real, industrially-based experiment regarding brainstorming. The results and observations suggest that having a guided approach to sourcing creative stimuli is very beneficial. The use of the TRIZ contradiction matrix and inventive principles is also shown to be a good example of a guided approach in terms of increasing creative performance. However, the Sweeper tool using internally sourced stimuli provides a method that is useful and more a practical alternative, as it is based firmly in the domain of activity.

Designing for 'use phase' energy losses of domestic products

Abstract The energy efficiency of products can be established by calculating the energy losses of the product. This paper shows that there are two kinds of losses: intrinsic losses, determined by the technology and materials used to construct the product, and user-related losses, which are caused by varying and inefficient use of that product by the user. User-related losses are a significant proportion of energy use of products and are likely to increase in proportion as engineers use good design and technology to drive the intrinsic losses closer and closer to what the authors call the theoretical minimum. The paper goes on to set out a theoretical framework for understanding and calculating the intrinsic and user-related losses of products and concludes by suggesting an outline of appropriate design strategies for tackling them.

Assessing user behaviour for changes in the design of energy using domestic products

This paper explores the contribution that user behaviour could make to the creation of new energy efficient products. It does this by first looking at the energy demand of 6 households then discusses the identification of the products with the highest potential for improvement. This is then narrowed down to products with a high energy impact and those where a high level of human interaction and use is also evident. A model for guiding design changes based on a theoretical minimum energy level for each product is presented. The paper ends with a behaviour based design assessment procedure based on the results of the 6 household study.

Creative Stimulation in Conceptual Design: An Analysis of Industrial Case Studies

When retrospectively analyzing the design process of a creative product, the creative leap or moment of inspiration is often described by the designer in an ‘idealized way’ [1]. There is little evidence within literature describing when the ideas behind promising concepts were conceived. This study tracks several real industrial design projects in the early conceptual design phase. The development and manipulation of ideas captured during the initial group brainstorm meeting are assessed in terms of the concepts at the following stage gate meeting. In addition, several different forms of stimulus were introduced to the different groups and compared to a control group. The results showed that the frequency of idea production remained virtually constant for the first 60 minutes. However, the number of ideas to form part of a concept at the stage gate meeting dropped markedly after the first 20 minutes. The frequency of appropriate ideas featuring within stage gate concepts increased with the introduction of stimuli, highlighting the positive effect of introducing stimuli.Copyright

An Empirical Study of how Innovation and the Environment are Considered in Current Engineering Design Practise

This paper reports the findings of a study of the current innovation and environmental considerations of six businesses that design and manufacture products affected by the product-related environmental legislation. Activities undertaken with the businesses provide insights into their New Product Development (NPD) processes, their innovation capabilities and their actions to improve their environmental performance. Several features of their NPD processes are suggested as presenting opportunities for eco-design tools to be integrated into design practises without negatively affecting the current NPD process. Finally, a conceptual framework is proposed which highlights the inter-relations between business, environmental, and customer requirements of a product across its lifecycle.

The importance of understanding the business context when planning eco-design activities

The implementation of eco-design within any existing business requires change. Change is required because eco-design involves the introduction and integration of new design criteria within an existing product development system. To support meaningful change, it is important to understand the current situation, or business context. The first eco-design case study presented in this paper, illustrates a failure to recognize the importance of understanding the business context. Through a retrospective analysis of this case study, a company characterization process (CCP) has been developed. The CCP is presented in this paper, and a further case study is provided to help exemplify its application. The CCP has been developed using an action research methodology to support the development of effective and efficient eco-design projects, through a three-step process that characterizes business features for eco-design activity planning. The tool has been developed for use in any company in the early stages of eco-design implementation, and particularly for to academics and industrial eco-design practitioners who are supporting company efforts from outside the company.

Studying the appearance and effect of creativity within the the latter stages of the product development process

This paper presents a framework and coding scheme for identifying creative design approaches, particularly towards the end of the design process. These were evaluated using five undergraduate students over a 22 week individual project. The designers either followed a routine approach (using well-understood schemes), an opportunistic approach (developing creative results through changes in how they apply the available variables to the task), or an astute approach (developing creative results by changing the variables themselves). The coding scheme allows greater understanding of the creative design process, which will then be used to improve support for designers, to the benefit of their working style and project.

Developing a Coding Scheme to Analyse Creativity in Highly-constrained Design Activities

This work is part of a larger project which aims to investigate the nature of creativity and the effectiveness of creativity tools in highly-constrained design tasks. This paper presents the research where a coding scheme was developed and tested with a designer-researcher who conducted two rounds of design and analysis on a highly-constrained design task. This paper shows how design changes can be coded using a scheme based on creative ‘modes of change’. The coding scheme can show the way a designer moves around the design space, and particularly the strategies that are used by a creative designer to skip from one ‘train of solutions’ to new avenues. The coding scheme can be made more robust by: ensuring design change is always coded relative to a reference design; tightening up definitions of ‘system’, ‘element’ and ‘function’; and using a matrix to develop a more complete set of codes. A much larger study with more designers working on different types of highly-constrained design task is needed, in order to draw conclusions on the modes of change and their relationship to creativity.

Supporting the development of shared understanding in distributed design teams

ABSTRACT Distributed teams are an increasingly common feature of engineering design work. One key factor in the success of these teams is the development of short- and longer-term shared understanding. A lack of shared understanding has been recognized as a significant challenge, particularly in the context of globally distributed engineering activities. A major antecedent for shared understanding is question asking and feedback. Building on question-asking theory this work uses a quasi-experimental study to test the impact of questioning support on homogeneous and heterogeneous teams. The results show significant improvement in shared understanding for both team types (27% improvement for heterogeneous and 16% for homogeneous), as well as substantial differences in how this improvement is perceived. This extends theoretical insight on the development of shared understanding and contributes one of few empirical studies directly comparing homogeneous and heterogeneous teams in the engineering design context. This has implications for how distributed teams can be more effectively supported in practice, as well as how shared understanding can be facilitated in engineering design.

How Does Sustainability Help or Hinder Innovation

This research analysed how sustainability impacts innovation in industry. Qualitative data was collected during interviews with employees from seven companies founded on sustainability principles. The data includes numerous examples of successful and unsuccessful sustainable design and manufacturing initiatives. Research findings indicate that improved packaging, eco-efficiency and the exploration of more sustainable solutions for standard products are fuelled by companies’ sustainability principles and successfully drive innovation. Whereas the supply of sustainable materials and trade-offs between sustainability and desirable material properties, as well as costs, represent challenges which can hinder innovation.