Thomas Howard

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.

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

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.