Luis Arthur Vasconcelos

Inspiration and Fixation: The Influences of Example Designs and System Properties in Idea Generation

When tackling problems, designers might be inspired by different sources, whether concrete or abstract. The more concrete sources often comprise representations of potential solutions or examples of existing designs. The more abstract sources often represent the desirable properties of engineered systems, such as modular system architectures. We performed an experiment with 60 novice designers to compare the inspiration effects from these two types of stimuli. Participants were asked to solve a design problem, having been exposed to a concrete example design, an abstract system property, both, or no stimulus at all. Their design work was assessed according to four metrics: fluency, diversity, commonness, and conformity. Exposure to either the example design or the system property reduced the fluency and diversity of ideas, and exposure to both stimuli reduced these measures even further. While there was no difference in the inspiration effects from the example and the property in terms of fluency, diversity, and commonness; results for conformity showed that each stimulus constrained participants differently: encouraging ideas similar to one type of stimulus, while discouraging ideas similar to the other type. In combination with other work on inspiration and fixation, these findings can help shape how design is taught and how inspiration tools are developed.

To Copy or Not to Copy: The Influence of Instructions in Design Fixation Experiments

Design fixation experiments often require participants to solve a design problem whilst being exposed to an example solution and instructions for how to treat that example. However, little is known about the influence of such instructions, leading to difficulties in interpreting results and understanding how the introduction of examples affects idea generation. In our experiment, participants were all provided with the same design problem and example solution, but were presented with different instructions, ranging from strongly encouraging copying the example to strongly discouraging copying. Analyses of participants’ work indicated that only the instructions encouraging copying had an effect. When encouraged to copy, participants tended to only copy the structural features of the example rather than the underlying concept. By contrast, the number of features copied was not reduced when participants were discouraged from copying. These findings suggest that there are subtle interactions between instructions and stimuli that influence design fixation.

Increasing kinect application development productivity by an enhanced hardware abstraction

Designing and implementing the interaction behavior for body tracking capable systems requires complex modeling of actions and extensive calibration. Being the most recent and successful device for robust interactive body tracking, Microsofts Kinect has enabled natural interaction by the use of consumer hardware, providing detailed and powerful information to designers and developers, but little tooling. To fulfill this lack of adequate tools for helping developers in the prototyping and implementation of such interfaces, we present Kina, a toolkit that makes the development not fully conditional to the existence of a sensor. By providing playback capabilities together with an online movement database, it reduces the physical effort found while performing testing activities.

Computer-Based "Mental Set" Tasks: An Alternative Approach to Studying Design Fixation

The term “design fixation” refers to a phenomenon where designers unknowingly limit the space within which they search for solutions. In an attempt to study this phenomenon experimentally, researchers typically set participants open-ended design problems, prime them with an example solution, and measure their performance through a variety of subjective metrics. This approach gives rise to various problems, including limited data capture and highly subjective evaluation of design behavior. To address these problems, we studied design fixation with a computer-based task inspired by psychological paradigms used to study “mental set” (also known as the “Einstellung effect”). The task consisted of a gamelike activity requiring participants to design a bridge within a specified budget. The use of a digital environment facilitated continuous data capture during the design activities. The constrained task (and direct quantitative measures) permitted a more objective analysis of design performance, including the occurrence of fixation. The results showed that participants who developed a mental set during the task failed to find alternative, more efficient solutions in trials admitting multiple solutions, compared to the participants who did not fall victim to this mental block. In addition, during the process of designing, the occurrence of mental set resulted in participants adopting a less efficient design behavior and reporting a different subjective experience of the task. The method used and the results obtained show an exciting alternative for studying design fixation experimentally and promote a wider exploration of the variety of design activities in which fixation might occur.

Scissors A Precise Pointing Widget for Touch Screen Devices

A common complaint of touch interaction concerns the lack of precision and false negatives, especially in applications inherited from the PC and mouse context. This work introduces Scissors, a virtual widget for tasks that require precision while interacting with touch screens. It also prevents occlusion of targets, is effective for screen edges and is compatible with current interaction techniques. We developed two prototypes for testing: the first introduced a basic learning scenario and the second presented two sequences of targets with different sizes and locations. The system recorded, for each target, the time spent and number of attempts to select it. We performed tests with thirty-one users and evaluated their data according to statistical test, in this case, t-test for difference of means. The results showed that the Scissors widget was very effective in the scenarios that motivated its conception attaining an equivalent or up to 11.5 times higher success rate, thus achieving its main purpose.

Luz, Câmera, libras!: how a mobile game can improve the learning of sign languages

There is a natural communication barrier between hearing and non-hearing people, and one of the reasons is the lack of knowledge about sign languages. This paper presents a study about a mobile application for learning and practicing the Brazilian sign language (Libras). The application consists of a guessing game in which two players must guess each others signs. For two months, the data collected from the game server and from the user gaming experience was analyzed with regard to the user interaction, engagement, fun and learning. The obtained results indicate that due to the mobile nature of the application, the drop rate was higher than expected. However, the user information demonstrated that learning tools can benefit from the mobile and ubiquitous nature of such devices. Despite the many drawbacks found, users confirmed the game was fun and effective for learning a sign language.

Research data supporting "Computer-Based "Mental Set Tasks": An Alternative Approach to Studying Design Fixation".

This is an excel file containing the numerical data resulting from the scoring of the videos recorded during each experimental session. The videos are not available for ethical reasons. The excel file includes several spreadsheets, whose naming corresponds to the various set of results reported in the publication (Open-ended ‘mental set’ tasks: An alternative approach to studying design fixation). In each spreadsheet, the column headings are self-explanatory, provided you also have the corresponding publication given above as a reference. The data was collected from July to October 2016 from 40 undergraduate and postgraduate students with an engineering background at the University of Cambridge, UK. Participants were tested individually and received £10 for your participation. They were initially told that the study aimed at investigating how people played computer games. The real aim of the study was revealed to the participants at the end of each experimental session, during the debriefing phase. Demographic data was collected from the participants and are reported in the first spreadsheet of the file. The study was approved by the local Ethical Committee and the participants signed a Consent Form before starting with the experiment.

Research data supporting "Studying design fixation with a computer-based task"

This is an excel file containing the numerical data resulting from the scoring of the videos recorded during each experimental session. The videos are not available for ethical reasons. The excel file includes several spreadsheets, whose naming corresponds to the various set of results reported in the publication (Open-ended ‘mental set’ tasks: An alternative approach to studying design fixation). In each spreadsheet, the column headings are self-explanatory, provided you also have the corresponding publication given above as a reference. The data was collected from July to October 2016 from 40 undergraduate and postgraduate students with an engineering background at the University of Cambridge, UK. Participants were tested individually and received £10 for your participation. They were initially told that the study aimed at investigating how people played computer games. The real aim of the study was revealed to the participants at the end of each experimental session, during the debriefing phase. Demographic data was collected from the participants and are reported in the first spreadsheet of the file. The study was approved by the local Ethical Committee and the participants signed a Consent Form before starting with the experiment.

Studying design fixation with a computer-based task

This work was supported by the UKs Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K008196/1) and the CAPES Foundation Ministry of Education of Brazil (BEX 11468/13-0).

Research data supporting "Fluency results in design fixation experiments: an additional explanation"

This is a ZIP archive file (.zip) containing both portable network graphics (.png) and comma-separated values (.csv) files: > The png files contain the annotated sketches that participants generated during the ideation session. This file type allows the non-digital data to be saved in a digital document format. The ideas from each group are stored into different folders, whose naming corresponds to the experimental conditions reported in the publication (FLUENCY RESULTS IN DESIGN FIXATION EXPERIMENTS: AN ADDITIONAL EXPLANATION). > The csv file contains the evaluation for all ideas generated by all participants in the experiment. This file type allows data to be saved in a table structured format. In the table, the column headings are self-explanatory, provided you also have the corresponding publication given above as a reference. The data was collected in January 2015 from 55 undergraduate students in engineering at the University of Cambridge, UK. Participation in the experiment was part of the students’ education, and was aimed at collecting data that could later be used to introduce them to the concept of design fixation. No demographic data was collected from the participants, but as first year undergraduate students they were broadly similar in age and design experience, drawn from a cohort with a male-female ratio of 3:1. No consent form was required for this experiment