Ecosystem Interactions Class Discussion Presentation in Blue Green Lined Styl...
Design Computing and Cognition 2012
1. Mitigating design fixation
effects in engineering
design through product
dissection activities
Christine Toh1, Dr. Scarlett Miller2 and Dr. Gül Kremer2
Mechanical Engineering1 and Engineering Design2
2. “Everything that is absorbed and registered in your
mind adds to the collection of ideas stored in the
memory: a sort of library that you can consult whenever
a problem arises. So, essentially the more you have
seen, experienced, and absorbed, the more points of
reference you will have.”
~Herman Herzberger
3. Search for Ideas in Associative Memory
Internal Cues
Retrieve
Image
Knowledge
Idea Production
Activation
External Cues
[Nijistad and Soebe 2006]
4. Design Examples
…impact creativity and novelty during idea generation
[Jansson & Smith, 1991; Purcell & Gero, 1996; Tseng et al., 2008; Linsey et al. 2010]
5. Product Dissection
… helps students understand the product and its
properties
[ Wood, 2001; Lamancusa & Gardner, 1999; Grantham et al., 2010]
6. Extraversion
Openness Agreeableness
Five Factor Model
of Personality
(Costa 1992)
Neuroticism Conscientiousness
Personality Traits
…affect team dynamics and involvement in activities
[Mann, 1959; LePine & Van Dyne, 2001; Driskell et al., 2006; Hoon & Tan, 2008]
7. Individual Exposure to
Design
personality Product
Fixation
Traits Dissection
Research Hypothesis
Personality and product dissection affect design fixation
8. The Participants
61 males 15 females
The Task
Exploratory Study
Redesign of an electric toothbrush for increased portability
10. Team leader Manuf.
Part Name Function Mass (oz, g) Material Dimensions
# Process
Holds motor Molded L 16.4 cm W
2 Body and batteries 2.56 oz Plastic around motor 3.2 cm H 2.7
and grip cavity cm
Molded with
Plastic and L 7.2 cm W
1 Brush head Cleans teeth .192 oz bristles
bristles 1.1 cm H 2 cm
inserted
L 6.3 cm W
Protects
1 Brush cap .096 oz Clear Plastic Molded 2.8 cm H 1.7
bristles
cm
Holds
L 2.3 cm W
batteries and Plastic, with Molded with
2 Battery Cover .192 oz 3.3 cm H 2.3
completes metal inside metal insert
cm
circuit
How was exposure measured within each team?
11. Original Design
Student’s Design
Design Rating for Fixation Measures
Obtaining the amount of fixation for each participant
12. Original Design
Student’s Design
1. The idea has the same location and number of 4 Completely Disagree
brush heads.
2. The idea has the same shaped brush head. 4 Completely Disagree
3. The idea has the same bristle length, hardness, 5 Not Explicitly Stated
and/or direction on the brush head
… … …
7. The idea performs the same functions. 2 Slightly Agree
8. The idea’s brush head is similar to the original 3 Slightly Disagree
design.
# Same Features (1 or 2 response) 1
# questions not rated as a 5 6
% Fixation 16.7%
14. (a) Correlations (b) MANOVA
Individual Exposure to Design Fixation
personality Dissection
Traits Activity and # ideas
Semester
Standing
(c) MANCOVA
Statistical Analysis
Does exposure to dissection activity affect % fixation?
15. Individual (a) Correlations Exposure to Design Fixation
personality Dissection
Traits Activity and # ideas
# Parts Exposed for brush head design
Extraversion: p < 0.03, r = 0.25
16. Individual Exposure to (b) MANOVA
Design Fixation
personality Dissection
and # ideas
Traits Activity
MANOVA results: Exposure to dissection activity
Brush Head Design:
-significant factors: # ideas and % fixation
p = 0.03, F = 2.80
Body Design:
No significant results
Group Rank for
Dissection (3 high)
1 2 3
Mean # ideas 4.45 4.43 6.5
St. Dev 0.7 1.6 1.7
17. IV: Exposure to DV: % Fixation
personality Dissection
Traits Activity and # ideas
covariates
Semester
Standing
(c) MANCOVA
18. MANCOVA Significant Factors
• Extraversion- scoring low on the extraversion scale
resulted in the production of more ideas
• Conscientiousness- average conscientiousness
resulted in less fixation
• Openness – scoring low on openness resulted in
more ideas
19. Limitations and Future Work
• Design fixation is complex and can be impacted by
individual factors in team environments
• Product dissection appears to have some impact on
fixation and idea production, but more studies are needed
to better understand it’s implications
• Results reveal a need to explore individual attributes in
conjunction with fixation in more detail and in a lab
(experimental design) setting
• Study focused on freshman engineering students, the
results could change based on engineering expertise
• Only explored form factors, not functional design aspects
20. Thank You Thank You
Dr. Gül Kremer Christine Toh
www.engr.psu.edu/britelab
21. Brush Head
Body Design
Power Generation
Energy Mechanism
Each member generated ideas for 2 categories of their choosing
76 Participants?
Editor's Notes
So the purpose of this study was to explore the interaction between product dissection, personality traits, and design fixation in engineering design. We hypothesized that fixation effects could potentially be mitigated through product dissection activities, and that the individual personality traits of the designers would affect the exposure to the dissection activity. Through this study, we found that the more parts a participant dissected, the more ideas they generated. We also found personality to play a role in the amount of exposure to the dissection activity, and successfully linked these personality traits to the amount of fixation experienced by the individual. As the innovative Dutch Structuralist, Herman Hertzberger once said, “QUOTE”. So we know that taking apart a product and understanding how it works can create points of reference in one’s head, and help in generating more diverse ideas. As mentioned before, product dissection can help in the creative process, and through our study, we found that this positive effect extends into design fixation as well. I also mentioned before how personality traits can affect team performance, and now we also know that personality can affect the relative exposure to this dissection activity, and can therefore affect design fixation. Future studies will explore these interactions in detail, as well as examine the impact of product dissection on other creativity metrics such as novelty. We also plan on looking at how the results of this study can be mapped to a virtual environment, where product dissection can be reproduced digitally, allowing more designers to experience it’s positive benefits.
The probability of retrieving an image is dependent on the association between the search cue and the image.
Jansson and Smith defined Fixation as a “Blind and sometimes counter-productive adherence to a limited set of ideas”.Follow-up studies found that design fixation is complex in nature. For example, Purcell and Geroshowed that Fixation depended on factors such as the designer’s domain of knowledge, and Tseng et al. showed that it depended on the timing and analogical similarity of the example. Linsey et al. even showed that experts in this field- faculty that studied fixation- were not immune to its limiting effects.However, there are methods that help mitigate fixation, such as providing de-biasing instructions, or useful analogies- but these methods are not practical because they are not currently used in engineering design settings (need to be implemented), and tend to be surface level and less hands on.One way that design fixation can be potentially mitigated is through product dissection activities because these activities are already being implemented in the classroom and have long since been recognized as a useful design technique in industry.
Product dissection involves taking apart a product and examining the internal structure and mechanisms of it. This is typically done to benchmark competing products or to uncover opportunities for redesign. In this picture here, someone had just dissected a Faraday Flashlight and laid out all the parts- discovering what each part does. This process has been shown to be effective in the design process. For example, Lamancusa & Gardner found that product dissection activities helped Engineering Design students understand the product, and thus, find ways to improve the product. The most interesting thing to note is that product dissection can help with the creative process. Grantham et al. found that students that participated in a product dissection activity tended to be more creative in idea generation, and focused on both the form and function of the product, rather than just the form. This is interesting, but this study never considered team dynamics and individual factors such as personality traits– which is important because product dissection activities are typically performed in small teams. This is important because personality traits may affect the amount of exposure a team member may have to the dissection activity.
Extraversion is how outward spoken and assertive someone is. On the other hand, conscientiousness is defined as a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement. Openness is show open someone is to new experiences. All these traits can be measured on a scale of 0 to 100 through the use of Likert-type questionnaires. With regards to teamwork, Mann has shown that these personality traits do indeed affect small team performance. LePineand Van Dyne even showed that extraverted team members were more likely to cooperate than those that scored high on neuroticism. Other studies found that extraverted individuals encouraged successful team performance, and conscientious individuals participated in less social loafing. So can be seen that personality traits play an important role in determining team dynamics and performance. However, personality has not been studied for its effect on team-based design activities– like product dissection.----- Meeting Notes (6/7/12 07:49) -----Extraversion - how outward spoken or assertive someone isConcientiousness - tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, aim for achievementExtraverts + team experience, Extraversion - less social loafing, neurotic individuals are less likely to participate
Therefore, the goal of this study is toexplore the effect of personality traits on exposure to product dissection, the effect of exposure to product dissection on design fixation, and lastly, the combined effect of personality traits and product dissection on the resulting design fixation. In short, the goal of this research is to show that product dissection can mitigatedesign fixation effects, and to link personality traits to exposure to the dissection activity, and hence, design fixation.ADD PICTURES
This chart here shows the mean and standard deviation of each personality trait of all our participants. Something interesting to note here is that our participants scored really high on conscientiousness. This is interesting and in line with what we would expect engineers be– hard working and diligent. hard working and diligent - conscientiousThey then formed 4 member-design teams … Two sections redesigned the Oral-B Advance Power toothbrush (on the left), and one section redesigned the Oral-B Cross-action power toothbrush (on the right). 4 categories
The participants were then given 2 hours to perform a product dissection of the toothbrush with their design teams, and the name of the team member that dissected each part was recorded. We also obtained the time it took to dissect each part, as well as the number of parts each participant dissected or was ‘exposed’ to from the bill of materials each team had to produce at the end of the activity. A week after that, the participants attended a brainstorming session where they were given 30 minutes to generate as many ideas a possible for each category of the toothbrush on paper. The designs were then collected and rated for the amount of fixation apparent in each design.
Each team had to fill out a bill of materials… identify the team leader for each part. Exposure was taken as a rank between each team (1 lowest, 4 highest) for each category, brush head or body desigN).
To do this, 2 independent raters were recruited to judge each design for its similarity to the original design. We constructed 16questions for the brush head category and 15 questions for the body design category. Each of these questions got at the similarity of each feature of the generated idea with the original design. So, for example, given the original design, this student’s design of the brush head can be rated for this question. “The idea has the same location and number of brush heads”. The options can either be agree, disagree, or not explicitly stated if the design does not even address this feature at all. So in this case, the raters would rate this question as completely disagree since the idea is drawn with two brush heads, and the words “double moving parts” are written there.
We also looked at other aspects of the design, and constructed questions that assessed the similarities of these features. For example, because this design is significantly different from the original design, the resulting fixation rating was very low, in fact, this design was given a fixation score of 16.7%. This rating process was done for all the designs in the 2 categories by our 2 raters and the and the Inter-rater reliability was found to be 85.2%. The disagreements were settled through discussion between the raters until a consensus was reached.
From before, we anticipated that personality traits would affect the individual’s exposure to the dissection activity, and hence affect the amount of fixation experienced by each individual. With that in mind, first we performed a Pearson significance test between the individual personality trait scores and the # parts exposed. In order to normalize our results, we ranked this exposure within the team. Then, we performed an Mancovawith the independent variable being the # parts exposed (brush head and body) and the dependent variable being %fixation and # ideas. Lastly, an Analysis of Covariance was conducted with the IV being the personality trait scores, the DV being % fixation and # ideas, and the covariates being the # parts exposed and semester standing of each participant.
Our Pearson correlation test revealed that the # parts exposed was significantly correlated with the extraversion personality trait. These results were only found for the brush head design category, and not for the body design category.These results suggest that extraverted and individuals tended to be more involved in the dissection activity when compared in their teams. This was expected as prior results have shown that LePineand Van Dyne showed that extraverted team members were more likely to cooperate in team activities
Before we ran the analysis, we conducted a test for equality of covariance matrices between # parts exposure and % fixation and # ideas was performed and passed (p >0.5). Therefore, a MANOVA was conducted on these variables.The results revealed that the relationship between # parts exposed for the brush head designs and both the % fixation and # ideas was significant (F =2.80, p < 0.03; Wilk'sλ = 0.854, partial ε2 = 0.076), but the relationship between # parts exposed for the body designs and % fixation and # ideas was not significant (F =2.04, p < 0.09; Wilk'sλ = 0.890, partial ε2 = 0.057).Post Hoc tests revealed a significant difference between those who performed the brunt of the dissection activities and those who did not (1 and 2 > 3 and 4). In other words, those that were exposed to more parts during the dissection activity produced more ideas during the idea generation activity. This relationship indicates that team members that perform the brunt of the dissection activity in their team appeared to have generated more ideas
To further our analysis, a test for the homogeneity of covariance was performed. The results revealed that extraversion (p > 0.6), agreeableness (p > 0.4), conscientiousness (p > 0.4), neuroticism (p > 0.3), and openness (p >0.3) did not differ on the covariates of # parts exposure and semester standing. This indicates that assumption of homogeneity of covariances was not violated. Therefore, a second analysis was performed with n MANCOVA and these attributes.Semester standing was chosen as a covariate in order to achieve statistical control of extraneous or ‘nuisance’ variables [31-33], and # parts exposed was chosen as a covariate in order to isolate the effects of different exposure time to the dissection activity. Our results revealed a significant relationship between extraversion and % fixation, as well as conscientiousness and % fixation. Significant results were also found between # ideas and the openness personality trait. These analyses used the # parts exposed and semester standing as covariates, effectively adjusting for these variables in the analysis. Semester standing was chosen as a covariate in order to achieve statistical control of extraneous or ‘nuisance’ variables [31-33], and # parts exposed was chosen as a covariate in order to isolate the effects of different exposure time to the dissection activity. These results suggest that personality can indeed affect the fixation experienced by the designer through the use of a team-based dissection activity. The use of the exposure to the dissection activity and semester standing as covariates indicates that these metrics play a role in the design fixation experienced by the individual.
Low conscientiousness has been linked to antisocial behaviors while high conscientiousness has been related to best predictors of performance in the workplaceOur results revealed a significant relationship between extraversion and % fixation, as well as conscientiousness and % fixation. Significant results were also found between # ideas and the openness personality trait. These analyses used the # parts exposed and semester standing as covariates, effectively adjusting for these variables in the analysis. Our exploration of the profile plots revealed the following:These results suggest that personality can indeed affect the fixation experienced by the designer through the use of a team-based dissection activity. The use of the exposure to the dissection activity and semester standing as covariates indicates that these metrics play a role in the design fixation experienced by the individual.
