Matthew G. Green

“Collaborating To Success”: An Experimental Study of Group Idea Generation Techniques

Numerous concept generation methods have been developed that can assist an engineer in the initial phases of design. Unfortunately, limited empirical data is available to guide users in selecting preferred techniques. This study systematically investigates underlying factors of four well-used and documented techniques: Brainsketching, Gallery, 6-3-5, and C-Sketch. These techniques are resolved into their key parameters and a factorial experiment is performed to understand how the key parameters affect the outcomes of the techniques. The factors chosen for this study include: how ideas are displayed to participants (all are viewed at once or exchanged between participants, “rotational viewing”) and the mode used to communicate ideas (written words only, sketches only, or a combination of written words and sketches). This study also provides a method for measuring the quantity of ideas generated when the ideas are represented in the form of both sketches and words. A number of interesting findings are produced from the study. First, the study shows that individuals gain a significant number of ideas from their teammates. Ideas when shared, can foster new idea tracks, more complete layouts, and diverse synthesis. Second, the systematic exchange of a set of ideas between participants produces a greater quantity of ideas than having all ideas displayed in a gallery form. This result shows that techniques like 6-3-5 or C-Sketch, where each person views only a subset of all the team’s ideas at any given time, are more likely to produce a larger quantity of ideas than techniques where individuals can continuously view all the ideas the team has generated. Finally, as teams developed ideas, the quality improved. This result is a consequence of the teamsharing environment and, in conjunction with quantity of concepts, validates the effectiveness of group idea generation.Copyright

Frontier Design: A Product Usage Context Method

The need exists to develop foundational knowledge, methods, and tools to equip engineers in discovering, documenting, and acting upon contextual information important for successful product design. In response to this need, this paper addresses a gap in current design methodologies which inadequately support accounting for contextual information. Adequately accounting for contextual information is especially challenging when the design context is frontier (unfamiliar) to the designers, as is often the case with high human-need projects. Based on a classification framework, literature search, and empirical study, a contextual needs assessment methodology is presented to assist the designer in discovering and documenting the “how,” “where,” and “who” factors of the product context. Experimental assessments and an application of the approach to an inventive product design provide both quantitative and qualitative measures of the usability, usefulness, and designer acceptance of the proposed contextual needs assessment method. Additionally, anonymous surveys report equal or greater perceived value of the new method for student design projects when compared with the benchmark of wellestablished methodologies such as black box and activity diagrams. These exciting results provide strong justification for the widespread dissemination of the methodology in education as well as in field practice.

Effects of Product Usage Context on Consumer Product Preferences

We present a framework for understanding product usage context and its impact upon customer needs and product preferences. We conduct customer interviews with two sets of representative products from the functional families of “mobile lighting” and “food boiling” products. Customer interviews lead to identification and characterization of distinct product usage contexts. Interactive surveys measuring customer product choice support the hypothesis that customer product preferences differ for each usage context identified. Further analysis shows that attributes of these chosen products are related to factors of the usage context (e.g. mass is related to transportation mode). These results demonstrate that valuable insight for product design is available through an understanding of usage context, and future work will refine and test methods to formally bring contextual information to bear on product design. These capabilities will be especially important for contexts in which needs assessment has traditionally been difficult, such as with latent needs and frontier design environments.Copyright

PRODUCT USAGE CONTEXT: IMPROVING CUSTOMER NEEDS GATHERING AND DESIGN TARGET SETTING

The early information-gathering stages of product design prove problematic for frontier design environments, or situations unfamiliar to the designer. This research provides a framework for gathering, documenting, and acting upon contextual information including the customer, market, and product usage context. This framework is validated through an empirical product study which shows that a chosen functional family of products, designed to fulfill the same primary function, exhibit significant differences in both customer needs and product requirement design targets. These differences are convincingly accounted for in terms of product usage context factors identified by the research. The functional family of “broadcast light and allow mobility” is selected, corresponding to a wide variety of candle and lantern-type products. It is shown that the products suited for long distance backpackers, for example, exhibit significantly lower volume and weight than the products intended for other usage contexts. The results presented provide a starting point to extend this research to other product domains, and support the future development of methods and tools equipping design engineers to successfully design products for frontier design environments.Copyright

A Systematic Method for Design Prototyping

Scientific evaluation of prototyping practices is an emerging field in design research. Prototyping is critical to the success of product development efforts, and yet its implementation in practice is often guided by ad hoc experience. To address this need, we seek to advance the study and development of prototyping principles, techniques, and tools. A method to repeatedly enhance the outcome of prototyping efforts is reported in this paper. The research methodology to develop this method is as follows: (1) systematically identify practices that improve prototyping; (2) synthesize these practices to form a guiding method for designers; and (3) validate that the proposed method encourages best practices and improves performance. Prototyping practices are represented as six key heuristics to guide a designer in planning: how many iterations to pursue, how many unique design concepts to explore in parallel, as well as the use of scaled prototypes, isolated subsystem prototypes, relaxed requirements, and virtual prototypes. The method is correlated, through experimental investigation, with increased application of these best practices and improved design performance outcomes. These observations hold across various design problems studied. This method is novel in providing a systematic approach to prototyping.

Crowd-Sourcing the Evaluation of Creativity in Conceptual Design: A Pilot Study

Creativity is often considered to be a critical aspect of engineering innovation and successful product design. Many methods have been proposed for enhancing creativity, originality, and innovation. When these methods are tested, the experiment often generates large numbers of concepts that must be evaluated by experts in a time-consuming process. Similarly, the increased use of crowd-sourcing for generating concepts often leads to a plethora of alternatives that must be evaluated. Accordingly, engineering design practitioners and researchers alike often find themselves evaluating large numbers of concepts. In this paper, the feasibility of using non-experts to evaluate engineering creativity is investigated. Dozens of students at two universities are asked to rate the originality of several different solutions to a design problem, for which validated expert ratings are available. Results indicate that it is possible to extract expert-level ratings from the non-expert student raters by focusing on the student raters with excellent inter-rater agreement amongst themselves and by training the students with example problems prior to the rating exercise. These results suggest that it may be possible to evaluate originality reliably with a large set of novice raters, perhaps with a Mechanical Turk type of approach.Copyright

Virtual or Physical Prototypes Development and Testing of a Prototyping Planning Tool

A new prototyping planning tool guides designers in choosing between virtual vs. physical prototyping strategies based on answers to Likert-scale questions. We developed this tool to augment prior work in design methods seeking to facilitate prototyping strategy development. This new tool was tested with a pilot experiment in which engineering students were tasked with optimizing the design of a four-bar linkage to be used to draw a specific shape. The students were then instructed to use the new prototyping planning tool to decide whether to create a virtual or physical prototype of a four-bar linkage, with the goal of maximizing the performance metric detailed in the design problem statement. This paper describes the new prototype strategy planning tool, the pilot experiment, and results and conclusions. The very encouraging pilot results provide a template and strong motivation for conducting a larger scale experiment for generic prototyping applications.

Investigating Spontaneous Flexibility in Concept Generation

Guilford’s Alternate Uses Test (ALTU) measures a person’s spontaneous flexibility, a propensity for generating many varied responses to a situation, by requiring them to list six possible uses for a given object. Shah’s metrics of ideation effectiveness measure the innovative qualities of engineering concepts with similar scales. The study presented in this paper explores the relationship between spontaneous flexibility and engineering concept generation through a research study. Fifty-two participants generated ideas for three items on a spontaneous flexibility test (SFT) and three problems on an engineering ideation test (EIT). The participants’ responses were analyzed for fluency and flexibility. Correlations between the SFT and EIT were identified in order to better understand the role of spontaneity and divergent thinking in an engineering environment. It was found that both fluency and flexibility of responses were strongly correlated between the two test types. It is hypothesized that the EIT complements the SFT in measuring spontaneous flexibility in engineering design.Copyright

Heuristics-Based Prototyping Strategy Formation: Development and Testing of a New Prototyping Planning Tool

This work seeks to introduce and evaluate effects of a novel method for designing prototyping strategies. This newly developed heuristics-based tool guides designers in planning a prototyping strategy based on answers to Likert-scale questions that embody empirically validated heuristics. We created this tool to augment prior work in the development of prototyping planning methods. The new tool guides designers through six critical prototype strategy choices: (1) How many concepts should be prototyped? (2) How many iterations of a concept should be built? (3) Should the prototype be virtual or physical? (4) Should subsystems be isolated? (5) Should the prototype be scaled? (6) Should the design requirements be temporarily relaxed?

Analogy Seeded Mind Maps: Testing of a New Design-by-Analogy Tool

Recent research has investigated methods based on design-by-analogy meant to enhance concept generation. This paper presents Analogy Seeded Mind-Maps, a new method to prompt generation of analogous solution principles drawn from multiple analogical domains.The method was evaluated in two separate design studies using senior engineering students. The method begins with identifying a primary functional design requirement such as “eject part.” We used this functional requirement “seed” to generate a WordTree of grammatically analogical words for each design team. We randomly selected a set of words from each WordTree list with varying lexical “distances” from the seed word, and used them to populate the first-level nodes of a mind-map, with the functional requirement seed as the central hub. Design team members first used the word list to individually generate solutions and then performed team concept generation using the analogically seeded mind-map. Quantity and uniqueness of the resulting verbal solution principles were evaluated. The solution principles were further analyzed to determine if the lexical “distance” from the seed word had an effect on the evaluated design metrics. The results of this study show Analogy Seeded Mind-Maps to be useful tool in generating analogous solutions for engineering design problems.Copyright