We report four cases from a larger study, focusing on participants’ self-identified “most creative” concept in relation to their other concepts. As part of an ideation session, first-year engineering students were asked to create concepts for one of two engineering design problems in an 85-minute period, and were exposed to one of two different forms of fixation. Participants worked as individuals, first using traditional brainstorming techniques and generating as many ideas as possible. Design Heuristics cards were then introduced, and students were asked to generate as many additional concepts as possible. After the activity, participants ranked all of the concepts they generated from most to least creative. Representative cases include a detailed analysis of the concept that each participant rated as “most creative,” idea generation method used, and relative location and relationship of the concept to other concepts generated by that participant. Across four cases, we identified a number of characteristic “misrules” or misconceptions, revealing that first-year students judge creativity in their concepts in ways that could inhibit their ability to produce truly novel concepts. We present Design Heuristics as a tool to encourage the exploration of creative concept pathways, empowering students to create more novel concepts by rejecting misrules about creativity.
What is the Nature and Intended Use of Design Methods?colin gray
Interest in the codification and application of design methods is rapidly growing as businesses increasingly utilize “design thinking” approaches. However, in this uptake of design methods that encourage designerly action, the ontological status of design methods is often diffuse, with contradictory messages from practitioners and academics about the purpose and desired use of methods within a designer’s process. In this paper, I explore the paradoxical nature of design methods, arguing for a nuanced view that includes the (often) conflicting qualities of prescription and performance. A prescriptive view of methods is drawn from the specification of methods and their “proper” use in the academic literature, while a performative view focuses on in situ use in practice, describing how practitioners use methods to support their everyday work. The ontological characteristics and practical outcomes of each view of design methods are considered, concluding with productive tensions that juxtapose academia and practice.
Meaning Reconstruction as an Approach to Analyze Critical Dimensions of HCI R...colin gray
A critical tradition has taken hold in HCI, yet research methods needed to meaningfully engage with critical questions in the qualitative tradition are nascent. In this paper, we explore one critical qualitative research approach that allows researchers to probe deeply into the relationships between communicative acts and social structures. Meaning reconstruction methods are described and illustrated using examples from HCI research, demonstrating how social norms can be traced as they are claimed and reproduced. We conclude with implications for strengthening rigorous critical inquiry in HCI research, including the use of extant critical research methods to document transparency and thick description.
Inverting Critique: Emergent Technologically-Mediated Critique Practices of D...colin gray
Critique is the primary method of assessment used in design education, yet is not well understood apart from traditional structures of institutional power and faculty initiation. In this study, we analyze the classroom presentations and critiques of eleven teams in a design-focused human-computer interaction graduate program, focusing on an emergent instructional design for technologically-mediated critique created by experienced students serving as peer mentors. Initial analysis suggests complex interaction between multiple modes of critique beyond the “traditional” critique: 1) public oral critique led by faculty, 2) a critique document authored in Google Docs by experienced students, and 3) backchannel chat in Google Docs by experienced students. These interactions indicate instructional affordances for including many simultaneous users within an existing critique infrastructure. Implications of this instructional design for expanding the capacity of physical critique events and the role of participation in student learning are considered.
“Why are they not responding to critique?”: A student-centered construction o...colin gray
The crit is a dominant public instructional event, and has often been studied through the lens of institutional power, through the perspective of the instructor. In this study, we analyze the classroom presentations and critiques of three teams in a design-focused human-computer interaction graduate program, calling attention to other modes of student-generated critique that occur alongside the traditional formal conversation. These critiques comprise, in parallel: 1) a public oral critique led by the instructor alongside student questions; 2) a critique document collaboratively authored in Google Docs by experienced students; and 3) backchannel chat by experienced students via Google Doc messaging. Through the complex interactions between these modes of parallel critique, multiple levels of interaction and conversational behavior emerge, with experienced students shaping each type of feedback and use of technological tools. We present and analyze cases drawn from the teams through computer-mediated communication and critical pedagogy perspectives to characterize these interactions, documenting how experienced students take on different typifications—or understandings of role expectations within the conversation—which mediate the instructional qualities of the critique. We introduce three typifications: the relaxed professional in backchannel chat, poised professional in the Google Doc, and instructional tutor in the physical classroom space.
Supporting Idea Generation Through Functional Decomposition: An Alternative F...colin gray
This study explored how guided ideation can support concept initiation and development. We conducted a set of in-class activities in a junior-level industrial design studio at a large Midwestern US university with 20 students. Participants generated concepts individually while working on a previously defined problem. They performed a functional decomposition of existing concepts, then used a self-selected function to rapidly generate ideas in three stages over 45 minutes, supported by Design Heuristics cards. Through analysis of eight cases, we found that generated concepts were consistent with the originally defined function. The students’ ability to create a range of solutions increased over time, and concepts became more divergent through each of the three stages. Use of Design Heuristics changed, beginning as a tool for divergent concept generation (ideation), moving to a more mechanical transformation of existing concepts (iteration), and concluding with a broader, more evaluative synthetic framing (recomposition). Based on these results, we offer implications for the integration of idea generation methods across multiple stages in design and engineering contexts.
“It’s More of a Mindset Than a Method”: UX Practitioners’ Conception of Desig...colin gray
There has been increasing interest in the work practices of user experience (UX) designers, particularly in relation to approaches that support adoption of human-centered principles in corporate environments. This paper addresses the ways in which UX designers conceive of methods that support their practice, and the methods they consider necessary as a baseline competency for beginning user experience designers. Interviews were conducted with practitioners in a range of companies, with differing levels of expertise and educational backgrounds represented. Interviewees were asked about their use of design methods in practice, and the methods they considered to be core of their practice; in addition, they were asked what set of methods would be vital for beginning designers joining their company. Based on these interviews, I evaluate practitioner conceptions of design methods, proposing an appropriation-oriented mindset that drives the use of tool knowledge, supporting designers’ practice in a variety of corporate contexts. Opportunities are considered for future research in the study of UX practice and training of students in human-computer interaction programs.
What is the Content of “Design Thinking”? Design Heuristics as Conceptual Rep...colin gray
When engaged in design activity, what does a designer think about? And how does she draw on disciplinary knowledge, precedent, and other strategies in her design process in order to imagine new possible futures? In this paper, we explore Design Heuristics as a form of intermediate-level knowledge that may explain how designers build on existing knowledge of “design moves”—non-deterministic, generative strategies or heuristics—during conceptual design activity. We describe relationships between disciplinary training and the acquisition of such heuristics, and postulate how design students might accelerate their development of expertise.
Flow of Competence in UX Design Practicecolin gray
UX and design culture are beginning to dominate corporate priorities, but despite the current hype there is often a disconnect between the organizational efficiencies desired by executives and the knowledge of how UX can or should address these issues. This exploratory study addresses this space by reframing the concept of competence in UX to include the flow of competence between individual designers and the companies in which they work. Our reframing resulted in a preliminary schema based on interviews conducted with six design practitioners, which allows this flow to be traced in a performative way on the part of individuals and groups over time. We then trace this flow of individual and organizational competence through three case studies of UX adoption. Opportunities for use of this preliminary schema as a generative, rhetorical tool for HCI researchers to further interrogate UX adoption are considered, including accounting for factors that affect adoption.
What is the Nature and Intended Use of Design Methods?colin gray
Interest in the codification and application of design methods is rapidly growing as businesses increasingly utilize “design thinking” approaches. However, in this uptake of design methods that encourage designerly action, the ontological status of design methods is often diffuse, with contradictory messages from practitioners and academics about the purpose and desired use of methods within a designer’s process. In this paper, I explore the paradoxical nature of design methods, arguing for a nuanced view that includes the (often) conflicting qualities of prescription and performance. A prescriptive view of methods is drawn from the specification of methods and their “proper” use in the academic literature, while a performative view focuses on in situ use in practice, describing how practitioners use methods to support their everyday work. The ontological characteristics and practical outcomes of each view of design methods are considered, concluding with productive tensions that juxtapose academia and practice.
Meaning Reconstruction as an Approach to Analyze Critical Dimensions of HCI R...colin gray
A critical tradition has taken hold in HCI, yet research methods needed to meaningfully engage with critical questions in the qualitative tradition are nascent. In this paper, we explore one critical qualitative research approach that allows researchers to probe deeply into the relationships between communicative acts and social structures. Meaning reconstruction methods are described and illustrated using examples from HCI research, demonstrating how social norms can be traced as they are claimed and reproduced. We conclude with implications for strengthening rigorous critical inquiry in HCI research, including the use of extant critical research methods to document transparency and thick description.
Inverting Critique: Emergent Technologically-Mediated Critique Practices of D...colin gray
Critique is the primary method of assessment used in design education, yet is not well understood apart from traditional structures of institutional power and faculty initiation. In this study, we analyze the classroom presentations and critiques of eleven teams in a design-focused human-computer interaction graduate program, focusing on an emergent instructional design for technologically-mediated critique created by experienced students serving as peer mentors. Initial analysis suggests complex interaction between multiple modes of critique beyond the “traditional” critique: 1) public oral critique led by faculty, 2) a critique document authored in Google Docs by experienced students, and 3) backchannel chat in Google Docs by experienced students. These interactions indicate instructional affordances for including many simultaneous users within an existing critique infrastructure. Implications of this instructional design for expanding the capacity of physical critique events and the role of participation in student learning are considered.
“Why are they not responding to critique?”: A student-centered construction o...colin gray
The crit is a dominant public instructional event, and has often been studied through the lens of institutional power, through the perspective of the instructor. In this study, we analyze the classroom presentations and critiques of three teams in a design-focused human-computer interaction graduate program, calling attention to other modes of student-generated critique that occur alongside the traditional formal conversation. These critiques comprise, in parallel: 1) a public oral critique led by the instructor alongside student questions; 2) a critique document collaboratively authored in Google Docs by experienced students; and 3) backchannel chat by experienced students via Google Doc messaging. Through the complex interactions between these modes of parallel critique, multiple levels of interaction and conversational behavior emerge, with experienced students shaping each type of feedback and use of technological tools. We present and analyze cases drawn from the teams through computer-mediated communication and critical pedagogy perspectives to characterize these interactions, documenting how experienced students take on different typifications—or understandings of role expectations within the conversation—which mediate the instructional qualities of the critique. We introduce three typifications: the relaxed professional in backchannel chat, poised professional in the Google Doc, and instructional tutor in the physical classroom space.
Supporting Idea Generation Through Functional Decomposition: An Alternative F...colin gray
This study explored how guided ideation can support concept initiation and development. We conducted a set of in-class activities in a junior-level industrial design studio at a large Midwestern US university with 20 students. Participants generated concepts individually while working on a previously defined problem. They performed a functional decomposition of existing concepts, then used a self-selected function to rapidly generate ideas in three stages over 45 minutes, supported by Design Heuristics cards. Through analysis of eight cases, we found that generated concepts were consistent with the originally defined function. The students’ ability to create a range of solutions increased over time, and concepts became more divergent through each of the three stages. Use of Design Heuristics changed, beginning as a tool for divergent concept generation (ideation), moving to a more mechanical transformation of existing concepts (iteration), and concluding with a broader, more evaluative synthetic framing (recomposition). Based on these results, we offer implications for the integration of idea generation methods across multiple stages in design and engineering contexts.
“It’s More of a Mindset Than a Method”: UX Practitioners’ Conception of Desig...colin gray
There has been increasing interest in the work practices of user experience (UX) designers, particularly in relation to approaches that support adoption of human-centered principles in corporate environments. This paper addresses the ways in which UX designers conceive of methods that support their practice, and the methods they consider necessary as a baseline competency for beginning user experience designers. Interviews were conducted with practitioners in a range of companies, with differing levels of expertise and educational backgrounds represented. Interviewees were asked about their use of design methods in practice, and the methods they considered to be core of their practice; in addition, they were asked what set of methods would be vital for beginning designers joining their company. Based on these interviews, I evaluate practitioner conceptions of design methods, proposing an appropriation-oriented mindset that drives the use of tool knowledge, supporting designers’ practice in a variety of corporate contexts. Opportunities are considered for future research in the study of UX practice and training of students in human-computer interaction programs.
What is the Content of “Design Thinking”? Design Heuristics as Conceptual Rep...colin gray
When engaged in design activity, what does a designer think about? And how does she draw on disciplinary knowledge, precedent, and other strategies in her design process in order to imagine new possible futures? In this paper, we explore Design Heuristics as a form of intermediate-level knowledge that may explain how designers build on existing knowledge of “design moves”—non-deterministic, generative strategies or heuristics—during conceptual design activity. We describe relationships between disciplinary training and the acquisition of such heuristics, and postulate how design students might accelerate their development of expertise.
Flow of Competence in UX Design Practicecolin gray
UX and design culture are beginning to dominate corporate priorities, but despite the current hype there is often a disconnect between the organizational efficiencies desired by executives and the knowledge of how UX can or should address these issues. This exploratory study addresses this space by reframing the concept of competence in UX to include the flow of competence between individual designers and the companies in which they work. Our reframing resulted in a preliminary schema based on interviews conducted with six design practitioners, which allows this flow to be traced in a performative way on the part of individuals and groups over time. We then trace this flow of individual and organizational competence through three case studies of UX adoption. Opportunities for use of this preliminary schema as a generative, rhetorical tool for HCI researchers to further interrogate UX adoption are considered, including accounting for factors that affect adoption.
Struggle Over Representation in the Studio: Critical Pedagogy in Design Educa...colin gray
Critical pedagogy has historically been used to document and explicate unequal power relationships in education environments, but this perspective has not been fully developed in the context of design education. The purpose of this study is to begin the process of synthesizing perspectives on critical pedagogy and what we know about representation and materiality in the studio space in order to see the tensions that arise as new methods of representation are explored and implemented in a relatively new studio space within an emergent design discipline. By documenting the tensions surrounding representation in the studio through a critical ethnography, issues of pedagogical oppression, student experience, and representations of design in this particular design field can be more rigorously explored, establishing a space for critical pedagogy in design education, and exploring forms of oppression that may be unique to creative disciplines.
Idea Generation Through Empathy: Reimagining the "Cognitive Walkthrough"colin gray
Engineering and design students are often required to evaluate their products against user requirements, but frequently, these requirements are abstracted from the user or context of use rather than coming from actual user and context data. Abstraction of user requirements makes it difficult for students to empathize with the eventual user of the product or system they are designing. In previous research, Design Heuristics have been shown to encourage exploration of design solutions spaces at the initial stages of design processes. This study combines use of Design Heuristics in an engineering classroom context with a method designed to connect students with an understanding the context of the user, product use setting, and sociocultural milieu. We adapted an existing method, the cognitive walkthrough, for use in an engineering education context, renaming it the empathic walkthrough. In this study, this method was revised and extended to maximize empathy with the end user and context, using these insights to promote a more situated form of idea development using the Design Heuristics cards. We present several case studies of students using this method to expand their notion of situated use, demonstrating how this method may have utility for importation into engineering contexts. Our early testing has indicated that this method stimulates empathy on the part of the student for the design context within which they are working, resulting in a richer narrative that foregrounds problems that a user might encounter.
Discursive Structures of Informal Critique in an HCI Design Studio colin gray
Critique has long been considered a benchmark of design education and practice, both as a way to elicit feedback about design artifacts in the process of production and as a high-stakes assessment tool in academia. In this study, I investigate a specific form of critique between peers that emerges organically in the design studio apart from coursework or guidance of a professor. Based on intensive interviews and observations, this informal peer critique appears to elicit the design judgment of the individual designer in explicit ways, encouraging peers to follow new paths in their design process, while also verbalizing often-implicit design decisions that have already been made. Implications for future research in academic and professional practice are considered.
Designers’ Articulation and Activation of Instrumental Design Judgments in Cr...colin gray
Cross-cultural design practices have begun to rise in prominence, but these practices have infrequently intersected with common user-centered design practices that value the participation and lived experience of users. We identified the ways in which the design team referred to co-creation workshop participants during the design and debrief of the workshop, focusing on how these references invoked or implicated the design team’s understanding of Chinese culture. We identified referents to the participants, using occurrence of third-person plural pronouns to locate projection of and reflection on participant interaction. In parallel, we performed a thematic analysis of design and debrief activities to document the team’s articulation and activation of instrumental judgments relating to culture.
The team’s instrumental judgments shifted substantially across the design and debrief session, moving from totalizing cultural references in the design phase to frequent translator-mediated interactions in the debrief phase. Translators “nuanced” the cultural meanings being explored by the design team, while team members attempted to engage with cultural concerns by “making familiar” these concerns within the context of their own culture. Implications for considering culture as a part of standard user research methods and paradigms are considered, along with practical considerations for foregrounding cultural assumptions in design activity.
Normativity in Design Communication: Inscribing Design Values in Designed Art...colin gray
The design community has discussed issues of ethics and values for decades, but less attention has been paid to the question of how an ethical sensibility might be developed or taken on by design students. In this analysis, we explore how normative concerns emerge through the process of design reviews—where a developing designer’s normative infrastructure is engaged with the artifact they are designing. We focused on the normative concerns that were foregrounded by two undergraduate and two graduate industrial design students across a series of five design reviews, addressing the possible relationship between the emergence of normative concerns and the inscription of norms in the final designed artifact. We used several critical qualitative techniques, including sequence analysis and meaning reconstruction to locate areas where normative concerns were addressed.
Normative concerns only arose in explicit form in the earliest review sessions on the graduate level, if they were going to arise at all, and end-user research appeared to be the primary mechanism for introducing norms into the design process. Neither instructor actively engaged or foregrounded the normative infrastructure of the design students, and all of the normative concerns discussed in the four cases were brought to the conversation by students. Implications for including awareness of normative concerns as part of a student’s developing design character are considered as part of a systemic approach to ethics and values in design education.
What Problem Are We Solving? Encouraging Idea Generation and Effective Team C...colin gray
Idea generation has frequently been explored in design education as an exercise of students’ “innate” creativity, and few tools or techniques are offered to scaffold ideation ability. As students develop their design skills, we expect them to demonstrate increasing ideation flexibility—a cognitive and social ability to see a problem from multiple perspectives, and to create more varied concepts within the problem space. In this study, we introduced three tools— functional decomposition, Design Heuristics, and affinity diagramming—to aid students’ ideation in a three-hour workshop. Participants included 20 students in a junior industrial design studio arranged in five pre-existing teams. These participants first decomposed the functions within an existing set of concepts they had generated, then selected a specific function and generated additional concepts using the Design Heuristics ideation method. Finally, teams organized these concepts using affinity diagramming to find patterns and additional concepts. Our findings suggest that this process encouraged students to try multiple ways of examining the existing problem space, resulting in a broadened set of final concepts. More striking, the instructional activities served to foreground differences in team members’ understanding of the problem they were addressing, fostering alignment of their problem statement and aiding in its further development.
What Happens when Creativity is Exhausted? Design Tools as an Aid for Ideationcolin gray
Numerous studies have shown the value of introducing cognitive supports to encourage the development of creative ability, using both convergent and divergent methods to develop and synthesize ideas. As part of this iterative idea generation process, design students often struggle to explore new ideas after their initial ideas are exhausted. Yet, there is little instructional guidance on how to productively use the exhaustion of ideas as a way to encourage the development of creative ability, particularly in relation to creativity support tools. In this study, an idea generation tool called Design Heuristics was employed in an industrial design course at a large Midwestern university. Students were given a simple design task, and 30 minutes to generate concept ideas on their own; then, after ten minutes of instruction on the Design Heuristics tool, students generated more ideas for an additional 30 minutes using the same problem. Working on their own, students generated an average of 6 concepts, and generated 2.7 additional concepts while using the Design Heuristics tool. Even though the initial ideation session resulted in more concepts, once their ideas were exhausted, the students were able to continue creating more concepts using Design Heuristics. Concepts created in this second session were rated as higher in their novelty, specificity, and relevance. These results suggest the advantages of introducing creativity support tools following a period where students can work using their own ideas; once exhausted, they may be more open to adopting the method or tool introduced, and may produce more creative outcomes.
Developing an Ethically-Aware Design Character through Problem Framingcolin gray
Expert designers determine what problem needs to be solved—framing the design space, and not just designing an appropriate solution. In this study, undergraduate and graduate industrial design students at a large Midwestern university were engaged in a one-day workshop, focusing on designing products for natives of Sub-Saharan Africa to sell in their home nations. Participants worked in teams to generate a range of constraints and problem statements. Teams struggled to identify specific use contexts and users, even though these elements were present in provided research materials. They appeared to build distance between their own experiences and that of the users they were designing for, potentially bifurcating their sense of ethics and normative commitments that were actively being reified in problem statements and solutions.
Studio Teaching in the Low-Precedent Context of Instructional Designcolin gray
Instructional design (ID) has been a scientized field of design for half a century, which means that models and principles have been emphasized in ID education over other forms of design knowledge, including precedent. In the study of design broadly defined, precedent is well established as a form of knowledge essential to competent practice. It is plentiful and made available through multiple channels, by practitioners as well as educators. This 7-year study examines the challenges for students in learning to recognize, appreciate and use precedent in designing images to support learning. These include the need to develop analogical thinking related to the use of precedent in their own work, to recognize precedents they already use without explicit awareness, to attend to precedent and seek it independent of its immediate use. Methods used in the studio course under study are discussed, together with examples of students' design activities at each stage in the evolution of the course. Data for this study comprise detailed field notes from each class period, student work, and reflections assigned as part of the regular class assignments.
Stop Telling Designers What To Do: Reframing Instructional Design Education T...colin gray
In this study, we address existing ID education through the lens of authentic ID practice, noting a lack of rigorous research into practice that should inform how we teach. Researchers observed eight ID practitioners conducting everyday activities in two organizations. Based on analysis of the judgments these designers made and the infrastructure surrounding their activities, implications for ID education are identified, including areas of authentic practice not usually addressed in courses.
Design in the “Real World”: Situating Academic Conceptions of ID Practicecolin gray
Understanding authentic ID practice on its own terms instead of through academically reified notions of practice may be required if our conceptual tools (theories, models and guidelines) are to be used in practice (Rowland, 1992; Stolterman et al. 2008). To do this, we discuss definitions of design theory in IDT and contrast them to the larger design community, suggesting future research on ID practice framed by a heightened notion of design theory and method.
Exploring the Lived Experience of Learners: Broadening our Understanding of A...colin gray
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on aesthetic learning experiences. We propose expanding this focus to account for the felt learner experience, including a deeper understanding of how learners build learning spaces surrounding the formal curriculum. This study is based on a one-year ethnography of a design studio, documenting how students actively engaged in informal learning in support and reaction to the formal pedagogy. Implications for the design of learning experiences are discussed.
What is design thinking and why educators should care about itYew Leong Wong
A deck of slides that explains the basic concepts of design thinking and makes a case for teaching design thinking, especially its ethical dimensions, in schools.
Why do startups avoid difficult problems?Joni Salminen
CITE: "Salminen, J. (2013) Why avoid difficult problems? Exploring the avoidance behavior within startup motive. Proceedings of LCBR European Marketing Conference, August 15–16, 2013, Frankfurt."
Download paper: http://jonisalminen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/why-founders-avoid-difficult-problems.pdf
Heutagogy: Changing the Playing Field (ICDE Pre-Conference Workshop)Lisa Marie Blaschke
Pre-Conference Workshop at the ICDE 2015 World Conference. How will heutagogy change the playing field? An introduction to heutagogy -- the study of self-determined learning -- and an exploration of the potential impact this learning and teaching approach has to influence our education systems.
Struggle Over Representation in the Studio: Critical Pedagogy in Design Educa...colin gray
Critical pedagogy has historically been used to document and explicate unequal power relationships in education environments, but this perspective has not been fully developed in the context of design education. The purpose of this study is to begin the process of synthesizing perspectives on critical pedagogy and what we know about representation and materiality in the studio space in order to see the tensions that arise as new methods of representation are explored and implemented in a relatively new studio space within an emergent design discipline. By documenting the tensions surrounding representation in the studio through a critical ethnography, issues of pedagogical oppression, student experience, and representations of design in this particular design field can be more rigorously explored, establishing a space for critical pedagogy in design education, and exploring forms of oppression that may be unique to creative disciplines.
Idea Generation Through Empathy: Reimagining the "Cognitive Walkthrough"colin gray
Engineering and design students are often required to evaluate their products against user requirements, but frequently, these requirements are abstracted from the user or context of use rather than coming from actual user and context data. Abstraction of user requirements makes it difficult for students to empathize with the eventual user of the product or system they are designing. In previous research, Design Heuristics have been shown to encourage exploration of design solutions spaces at the initial stages of design processes. This study combines use of Design Heuristics in an engineering classroom context with a method designed to connect students with an understanding the context of the user, product use setting, and sociocultural milieu. We adapted an existing method, the cognitive walkthrough, for use in an engineering education context, renaming it the empathic walkthrough. In this study, this method was revised and extended to maximize empathy with the end user and context, using these insights to promote a more situated form of idea development using the Design Heuristics cards. We present several case studies of students using this method to expand their notion of situated use, demonstrating how this method may have utility for importation into engineering contexts. Our early testing has indicated that this method stimulates empathy on the part of the student for the design context within which they are working, resulting in a richer narrative that foregrounds problems that a user might encounter.
Discursive Structures of Informal Critique in an HCI Design Studio colin gray
Critique has long been considered a benchmark of design education and practice, both as a way to elicit feedback about design artifacts in the process of production and as a high-stakes assessment tool in academia. In this study, I investigate a specific form of critique between peers that emerges organically in the design studio apart from coursework or guidance of a professor. Based on intensive interviews and observations, this informal peer critique appears to elicit the design judgment of the individual designer in explicit ways, encouraging peers to follow new paths in their design process, while also verbalizing often-implicit design decisions that have already been made. Implications for future research in academic and professional practice are considered.
Designers’ Articulation and Activation of Instrumental Design Judgments in Cr...colin gray
Cross-cultural design practices have begun to rise in prominence, but these practices have infrequently intersected with common user-centered design practices that value the participation and lived experience of users. We identified the ways in which the design team referred to co-creation workshop participants during the design and debrief of the workshop, focusing on how these references invoked or implicated the design team’s understanding of Chinese culture. We identified referents to the participants, using occurrence of third-person plural pronouns to locate projection of and reflection on participant interaction. In parallel, we performed a thematic analysis of design and debrief activities to document the team’s articulation and activation of instrumental judgments relating to culture.
The team’s instrumental judgments shifted substantially across the design and debrief session, moving from totalizing cultural references in the design phase to frequent translator-mediated interactions in the debrief phase. Translators “nuanced” the cultural meanings being explored by the design team, while team members attempted to engage with cultural concerns by “making familiar” these concerns within the context of their own culture. Implications for considering culture as a part of standard user research methods and paradigms are considered, along with practical considerations for foregrounding cultural assumptions in design activity.
Normativity in Design Communication: Inscribing Design Values in Designed Art...colin gray
The design community has discussed issues of ethics and values for decades, but less attention has been paid to the question of how an ethical sensibility might be developed or taken on by design students. In this analysis, we explore how normative concerns emerge through the process of design reviews—where a developing designer’s normative infrastructure is engaged with the artifact they are designing. We focused on the normative concerns that were foregrounded by two undergraduate and two graduate industrial design students across a series of five design reviews, addressing the possible relationship between the emergence of normative concerns and the inscription of norms in the final designed artifact. We used several critical qualitative techniques, including sequence analysis and meaning reconstruction to locate areas where normative concerns were addressed.
Normative concerns only arose in explicit form in the earliest review sessions on the graduate level, if they were going to arise at all, and end-user research appeared to be the primary mechanism for introducing norms into the design process. Neither instructor actively engaged or foregrounded the normative infrastructure of the design students, and all of the normative concerns discussed in the four cases were brought to the conversation by students. Implications for including awareness of normative concerns as part of a student’s developing design character are considered as part of a systemic approach to ethics and values in design education.
What Problem Are We Solving? Encouraging Idea Generation and Effective Team C...colin gray
Idea generation has frequently been explored in design education as an exercise of students’ “innate” creativity, and few tools or techniques are offered to scaffold ideation ability. As students develop their design skills, we expect them to demonstrate increasing ideation flexibility—a cognitive and social ability to see a problem from multiple perspectives, and to create more varied concepts within the problem space. In this study, we introduced three tools— functional decomposition, Design Heuristics, and affinity diagramming—to aid students’ ideation in a three-hour workshop. Participants included 20 students in a junior industrial design studio arranged in five pre-existing teams. These participants first decomposed the functions within an existing set of concepts they had generated, then selected a specific function and generated additional concepts using the Design Heuristics ideation method. Finally, teams organized these concepts using affinity diagramming to find patterns and additional concepts. Our findings suggest that this process encouraged students to try multiple ways of examining the existing problem space, resulting in a broadened set of final concepts. More striking, the instructional activities served to foreground differences in team members’ understanding of the problem they were addressing, fostering alignment of their problem statement and aiding in its further development.
What Happens when Creativity is Exhausted? Design Tools as an Aid for Ideationcolin gray
Numerous studies have shown the value of introducing cognitive supports to encourage the development of creative ability, using both convergent and divergent methods to develop and synthesize ideas. As part of this iterative idea generation process, design students often struggle to explore new ideas after their initial ideas are exhausted. Yet, there is little instructional guidance on how to productively use the exhaustion of ideas as a way to encourage the development of creative ability, particularly in relation to creativity support tools. In this study, an idea generation tool called Design Heuristics was employed in an industrial design course at a large Midwestern university. Students were given a simple design task, and 30 minutes to generate concept ideas on their own; then, after ten minutes of instruction on the Design Heuristics tool, students generated more ideas for an additional 30 minutes using the same problem. Working on their own, students generated an average of 6 concepts, and generated 2.7 additional concepts while using the Design Heuristics tool. Even though the initial ideation session resulted in more concepts, once their ideas were exhausted, the students were able to continue creating more concepts using Design Heuristics. Concepts created in this second session were rated as higher in their novelty, specificity, and relevance. These results suggest the advantages of introducing creativity support tools following a period where students can work using their own ideas; once exhausted, they may be more open to adopting the method or tool introduced, and may produce more creative outcomes.
Developing an Ethically-Aware Design Character through Problem Framingcolin gray
Expert designers determine what problem needs to be solved—framing the design space, and not just designing an appropriate solution. In this study, undergraduate and graduate industrial design students at a large Midwestern university were engaged in a one-day workshop, focusing on designing products for natives of Sub-Saharan Africa to sell in their home nations. Participants worked in teams to generate a range of constraints and problem statements. Teams struggled to identify specific use contexts and users, even though these elements were present in provided research materials. They appeared to build distance between their own experiences and that of the users they were designing for, potentially bifurcating their sense of ethics and normative commitments that were actively being reified in problem statements and solutions.
Studio Teaching in the Low-Precedent Context of Instructional Designcolin gray
Instructional design (ID) has been a scientized field of design for half a century, which means that models and principles have been emphasized in ID education over other forms of design knowledge, including precedent. In the study of design broadly defined, precedent is well established as a form of knowledge essential to competent practice. It is plentiful and made available through multiple channels, by practitioners as well as educators. This 7-year study examines the challenges for students in learning to recognize, appreciate and use precedent in designing images to support learning. These include the need to develop analogical thinking related to the use of precedent in their own work, to recognize precedents they already use without explicit awareness, to attend to precedent and seek it independent of its immediate use. Methods used in the studio course under study are discussed, together with examples of students' design activities at each stage in the evolution of the course. Data for this study comprise detailed field notes from each class period, student work, and reflections assigned as part of the regular class assignments.
Stop Telling Designers What To Do: Reframing Instructional Design Education T...colin gray
In this study, we address existing ID education through the lens of authentic ID practice, noting a lack of rigorous research into practice that should inform how we teach. Researchers observed eight ID practitioners conducting everyday activities in two organizations. Based on analysis of the judgments these designers made and the infrastructure surrounding their activities, implications for ID education are identified, including areas of authentic practice not usually addressed in courses.
Design in the “Real World”: Situating Academic Conceptions of ID Practicecolin gray
Understanding authentic ID practice on its own terms instead of through academically reified notions of practice may be required if our conceptual tools (theories, models and guidelines) are to be used in practice (Rowland, 1992; Stolterman et al. 2008). To do this, we discuss definitions of design theory in IDT and contrast them to the larger design community, suggesting future research on ID practice framed by a heightened notion of design theory and method.
Exploring the Lived Experience of Learners: Broadening our Understanding of A...colin gray
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on aesthetic learning experiences. We propose expanding this focus to account for the felt learner experience, including a deeper understanding of how learners build learning spaces surrounding the formal curriculum. This study is based on a one-year ethnography of a design studio, documenting how students actively engaged in informal learning in support and reaction to the formal pedagogy. Implications for the design of learning experiences are discussed.
What is design thinking and why educators should care about itYew Leong Wong
A deck of slides that explains the basic concepts of design thinking and makes a case for teaching design thinking, especially its ethical dimensions, in schools.
Why do startups avoid difficult problems?Joni Salminen
CITE: "Salminen, J. (2013) Why avoid difficult problems? Exploring the avoidance behavior within startup motive. Proceedings of LCBR European Marketing Conference, August 15–16, 2013, Frankfurt."
Download paper: http://jonisalminen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/why-founders-avoid-difficult-problems.pdf
Heutagogy: Changing the Playing Field (ICDE Pre-Conference Workshop)Lisa Marie Blaschke
Pre-Conference Workshop at the ICDE 2015 World Conference. How will heutagogy change the playing field? An introduction to heutagogy -- the study of self-determined learning -- and an exploration of the potential impact this learning and teaching approach has to influence our education systems.
Transforming engineering education requires a team. But what are the characteristics of productive teams? Using an NSF project as a testbed, the Purdue Agile Lab outlines how transformation in engineering education takes place with productive teams.
IIT Design Research Conference 2010 ReviewCeline Pering
The IIT Institute of Design's holds an Annual Design Research Conference (DRC) in downtown Chicago. This year it was held on May 10-12th 2010. The DRC is a professional conference that focuses on:
• Applied practice-based content
• Inspirational points of view
• Practice-focused knowledge sharing
The goal of this presentation is to share the learnings with the internal creative team at frog design to:
• Learn what other design firms are doing
• Gain insights from the work presented
• Understand how the role of design research is evolving
• Contextualize the work we are doing
Michelin Using TRIZ in the Product Development of Tweel Richard Platt
This is a presentation on How Michelin Tires used TRIZ to develop their Tweel design that has been making its way into the commercial market for its application on multiple automotive and wheeled vehicle applications
Developing Innovative Work Behavior for Sustainable Competitive ExcellenceSeta Wicaksana
The appearance of the so-called fourth industrial revolution and its technological trends have forced organizations to choose innovations to move forward or stagger and then fall behind.
In business today it is essential to innovate. Organizations need to continuously renew and improve their offerings to secure long-term survival, profitability, and growth. Organizations face many challenges and opportunities; the increasingly more competitive world has created a continuous need for new ways of doing things. The rate of technological, social, and institutional changes results in shorter life cycles of current products, services, and business processes. As a consequence, innovation is no longer reserved for those organizations and people doing scientific or technological work (Smith, 2002).
Any organization that is oblivious to this reality and does not innovate will become the ultimate reason for the decline and demise of existing organizations (Drucker, 1989).
Critical pedagogy and the pluriversal design studiocolin gray
Presented at the Design Research Society 2022 Conference. Full paper available at: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2022/researchpapers/34/
Abstract: Studio learning is central to the teaching of design. However, the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside emerging and historic critiques of studio pedagogy, creates a space for critical engagement with the present and potential futures of design education in studio. In this paper, I outline historic critiques of studio pedagogy, drawing primarily from critical pedagogy literature to frame is-sues relating to disempowerment, student agency, and monolithic representa-tions of the student role and student development. I build upon this critical foundation to reimagine studio practices as pluriversal, recognizing the challenges and opportunities of bridging epistemological differences and facilitating the potential for pluralism in design curricula, our student experiences, and the fu-ture of design professions.
Critique Assemblages in Response to Emergency Hybrid Studio Pedagogycolin gray
Presented at LearnxDesign 2021
Paper available at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w67bzn6awdkfkds/2021_Wolfordetal_LxD_CritiqueAssemblages.pdf?dl=0
Abstract: Studio education focuses on active learning and assessment that is embedded in students’ explora- tion of ill-structured problems. Critique is a central component of this experience, providing a means of sensemaking, assessment, and socialization. These critique sessions encompass multiple types of interactions among students and instructors at multiple levels of formality. In most design programs, these practices have been situated in a physical studio environment—until they were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a group of educators and design students, we used this disruption as an opportunity to reimagine means of critique engagement. In this paper, we document the creation, piloting, and evaluation of new critique assemblages—each of which bring together a group of tech- nology tools, means and norms of engagement, and channels of participation. We report both on the extension of existing critique types such as desk crits, group crits, and formal presentation crits, describing both the instructional goals of the new critique assemblages and the students’ experience of these assemblages. Building on these outcomes, we reflect upon opportunities to engage with new hybrid critique approaches once residential instruction can resume and identify patterns of socialization and wellbeing that have emerged through these assemblages that foster critical reflection on studio practices.
Cross-Cultural UX Pedagogy: A China–US Partnershipcolin gray
Presented at LearnxDesign 2021
Paper available at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/43n726gpz7vnat1/2021_Lietal_LxD_CrossCulturalUXPedagogy.pdf?dl=0
Abstract: The recent emergence of new undergraduate and graduate design programs with a focus specific to User Experience (UX) offers new opportunities to engage with the complexity of these educational practices. In this paper, we report on a series of ten interviews with students and faculty to describe cross-cultural connections between two UX-focused programs, one in China and one in the United States. Our study includes the perspectives of students who engaged in intercultural UX experiences, as well as the perspectives of the faculty who designed those student experiences through an inter- cultural partnership. We report on how each program was created, developed, and iterated upon, describing program goals and student experiences across both programs from student and instructor perspectives. We demonstrate the complexity of UX educational experiences on an international scale, concluding with opportunities for intercultural engagement and the potential for links among education, profession, culture, and pedagogy.
Autono-preneurial Agents in the Community: Developing a Socially Aware API fo...colin gray
In this paper, we describe our efforts to appropriate an autono-preneurial agent—in this case, the Amazon Locust—through the development of an API that enables equitable and socially aware entrepreneurial decision making on the part of the Locust. We present a new API and our intended vision for this system, along with our proposed deployment plan for implementing appropriated Locusts in Midwestern USA suburban communities. These appropriated Locusts will allow community provisioning decision-making that moves beyond consideration of profitability to also include decisions based on equity, equality, community, and interpersonal relationships. We discuss the broader implications of this work and point toward future areas of inquiry.
A Practice-Led Account of the Conceptual Evolution of UX Knowledgecolin gray
The contours of user experience (UX) design practice have been shaped by a diverse array of practitioners and disci- plines, resulting in a difuse and decentralized body of UX- specifc disciplinary knowledge. The rapidly shifting space that UX knowledge occupies, in conjunction with a long- existing research-practice gap, presents unique challenges and opportunities to UX educators and aspiring UX designers. In this paper, we analyzed a corpus of question and answer communication on UX Stack Exchange using a practice-led approach, identifying and documenting practitioners’ con- ceptions of UX knowledge over a nine year period. Specif- cally, we used natural language processing techniques and qualitative content analysis to identify a disciplinary vocab- ulary invoked by UX designers in this online community, as well as conceptual trajectories spanning over nine years which could shed light on the evolution of UX practice. We further describe the implications of our fndings for HCI research and UX education.
Analyzing Value Discovery in Design Decisions Through Ethicographycolin gray
HCI scholarship is increasingly concerned with the ethi- cal impact of socio-technical systems. Current theoretically- driven approaches that engage with ethics generally pre- scribe only abstract approaches by which designers might consider values in the design process. However, there is little guidance on methods that promote value discovery, which might lead to more specific examples of relevant values in specific design contexts. In this paper, we elaborate a method for value discovery, identifying how values impact the de- signer’s decision making. We demonstrate the use of this method, called Ethicography, in describing value discovery and use throughout the design process. We present analysis of design activity by user experience (UX) design students in two lab protocol conditions, describing specific human val- ues that designers considered for each task, and visualizing the interplay of these values. We identify opportunities for further research, using the Ethicograph method to illustrate value discovery and translation into design solutions.
HCI scholars have become increasingly interested in describ- ing the complex nature of UX practice. In parallel, HCI and STS scholars have sought to describe the ethical and value- laden relationship between designers and design outcomes. However, little research describes the ethical engagement of UX practitioners as a form of design complexity, including the multiple mediating factors that impact ethical awareness and decision-making. In this paper, we use a practice-led approach to describe ethical complexity, presenting three varied cases of UX practitioners based on in situ observations and interviews. In each case, we describe salient factors relat- ing to ethical mediation, including organizational practices, self-driven ethical principles, and unique characteristics of specific projects the practitioner is engaged in. Using the concept of mediation from activity theory, we provide a rich account of practitioners’ ethical decision making. We pro- pose future work on ethical awareness and design education based on the concept of ethical mediation.
“What do you recommend a complete beginner like me to practice?”: Professiona...colin gray
CSCW scholarship has previously addressed how professionals use digital technologies for learning and communication, but limited attention has been paid to professional self-disclosure on social media. Acts of self-disclosureâintentionally revealing personal information to othersâare often considered beneficial for communication and formation of relationships, and describing the role of disclosure in professional communication is important to advance CSCW research that focuses on occupations or organizational settings. In this paper, we present a mixed-methods study of professional self-disclosure in an online community focused on user experience design (UX), documenting how acts of self-disclosure may support professional development. We found that self-disclosure was frequently used as an effective rhetorical and content-focused strategy to provoke discussions and request assistance with the goal of developing or maintaining professional competence. Through the identification of these self-disclosure strategies, we discuss professional self-disclosure in relation to professional identity development in online communities.
Supporting Distributed Critique through Interpretation and Sense-Making in an...colin gray
Critique is an important component of creative work in design education and practice, through which individuals can solicit advice and obtain feedback on their work. Face-to-face critique in offline settings such as design studios has been well-documented and theorized. However, little is known about unstructured distributed critique in online creative communities where people share and critique each otherâs work, and how these practices might resemble or differ from studio critique. In this paper, we use mixed-methods to examine distributed critique practices in a UX-focused online creative community on Reddit. We found that distributed critique resembles studio critique categorically, but differs qualitatively. While studio critique often focuses on depth, distributed critique often revolved around collective sensemaking, through which creative workers engaged in iteratively interpreting, defining, and refining the artifact and their process. We discuss the relationship between distributed critique and socio-technical systems and identify implications for future research.
Distinctions between the Communication of Experiential and Academic Design Kn...colin gray
Design research has historically focused upon collocated design practices where the production of artefacts, collaboration between designers, and designers’ learning practices are geographically bounded. Information and communication technologies are rapidly transforming this territorial context of designing and making by supporting designers to share experiential knowledge with peers online. But it is unclear how experiential design knowledge should be characterized, and how it may be different from academic design knowledge. In this study, we present a mixed-methods analysis to compare experiential design knowledge communicated in two online practitioner-oriented venues and two leading design research journals. We found that the articulation of experiential academic knowledge unsurprisingly differs in multiple linguistic measurements such as patterns of word usage and language formality. However, we also found that these distinctions are not absolute; in certain instances of online argumentation, practicing designers are able to effectively discipline their language use with the purpose of articulation and accuracy. We argue for increased attention to the ways in which online discussions regarding design practices contribute to the construction of design knowledge.
Generating Mobile Application Onboarding Insights Through Minimalist Instructioncolin gray
Mobile application designers use onboarding task flows to help first time users learn and engage with key application functionality. Although some guidelines for designing onboarding flows have been offered by practitioners, a systematic, research-informed approach is needed. In this paper, we present the creation of a method for designing mobile application onboarding experiences. We used the minimalist instruction framework to engage twelve university students in an iterative set of design and evaluation activities. Participants interacted with a physical prototype of an educational badging mobile application through a semi-structured exploration and reflection activity, bookended by structured mini-interviews. We found that this method facilitated engagement with participants’ meaning-making processes, resulting in useful design insights and the creation of an onboarding task flow. Research opportunities for integrating instructional design and learning approaches in HCI in the context of onboarding are considered.
Interest in critical scholarship that engages with the complexity of user experience (UX) practice is rapidly expanding, yet the vocabulary for describing and assessing criticality in practice is currently lacking. In this paper, we outline and explore the limits of a specific ethical phenomenon known as "dark patterns," where user value is supplanted in favor of shareholder value. We assembled a corpus of examples of practitioner-identified dark patterns and performed a content analysis to determine the ethical concerns contained in these examples. This analysis revealed a wide range of ethical issues raised by practitioners that were frequently conflated under the umbrella term of dark patterns, while also underscoring a shared concern that UX designers could easily become complicit in manipulative or unreasonably persuasive practices. We conclude with implications for the education and practice of UX designers, and a proposal for broadening research on the ethics of user experience.
Forming A Design Identity in Computing Education Through Reflection and Peer ...colin gray
Presented at AERA'18.
Abstract: There is growing interest in reflection and the value of reflection activities in enhancing students’ metacognitive abilities. Reflection effectively connects thinking and doing, building students’ understanding both of what they know, and how to activate that knowledge in their future work. In this study, we explore the formation of students’ design identity as scaffolded by a reflection blog in a graduate human-computer interaction program. Data include 1619 posts and 2019 comments posted by 144 students across three consecutive semesters of an introductory graduate interaction design course. Our analysis demonstrates how designerly talk among students may influence understanding and performance in their future practitioner roles. Implications for professional identity formation, and the role of reflection in this process, are considered.
Breaking the Model, Breaking the “Rules:” Instructional Design in a Transdisc...colin gray
Presented at AERA'18.
Abstract: Instructional design as a practice and set of knowledge has long claimed to exist at a level “beyond discipline”—where the principles that designers derive from instructional theory and learning theory are in certain ways “content-agnostic.” This has led to an understanding of instructional design practice that privileges theoretical abstractions of instructional design activities over what are often thought of as “selection of a model” or “modifications to the model.” In this proposal, we rely upon a case study to illustrate these tensions and facilitate a conversation about the limitations of current ID models and practices. In the case, we describe the interactions among instructors and program designers in an experimental undergraduate transdisciplinary degree program across multiple years of course and program development, productively complicating traditional notions of ID practice as model-directed and model-driven. Through this case, we identify multiple tensions in designing across disciplines or in discipline-agnostic ways, including multiple instances where traditional ID guidance or knowledge is currently entirely lacking or insufficient. We conclude with opportunities for inculcating a more expansive notion of design in instructional design and technology to meet the growing need of designing inter/trans-disciplinary educational experiences.
Developing a Socially-Aware Engineering Identity Through Transdisciplinary Le...colin gray
In conjunction with the drive towards human-centered design in engineering education, questions arise regarding how students build and engage a socially-aware engineering identity. In this paper, we describe how students in a transdisciplinary undergraduate program struggle to engage with ontological and epistemological perspectives that draw on that social turn, particularly in relation to human-centered engineering approaches and sociotechnical complexity. We use a critical qualitative meaning reconstruction approach to deeply analyze the meaning-making assumptions of these students to reveal characteristic barriers in engaging with other subjectivities, and related epistemological and ontological claims implicit in these subjectivities. We conclude with implications for encouraging socially-aware identity formation in engineering education.
Courier management system project report.pdfKamal Acharya
It is now-a-days very important for the people to send or receive articles like imported furniture, electronic items, gifts, business goods and the like. People depend vastly on different transport systems which mostly use the manual way of receiving and delivering the articles. There is no way to track the articles till they are received and there is no way to let the customer know what happened in transit, once he booked some articles. In such a situation, we need a system which completely computerizes the cargo activities including time to time tracking of the articles sent. This need is fulfilled by Courier Management System software which is online software for the cargo management people that enables them to receive the goods from a source and send them to a required destination and track their status from time to time.
Welcome to WIPAC Monthly the magazine brought to you by the LinkedIn Group Water Industry Process Automation & Control.
In this month's edition, along with this month's industry news to celebrate the 13 years since the group was created we have articles including
A case study of the used of Advanced Process Control at the Wastewater Treatment works at Lleida in Spain
A look back on an article on smart wastewater networks in order to see how the industry has measured up in the interim around the adoption of Digital Transformation in the Water Industry.
Event Management System Vb Net Project Report.pdfKamal Acharya
In present era, the scopes of information technology growing with a very fast .We do not see any are untouched from this industry. The scope of information technology has become wider includes: Business and industry. Household Business, Communication, Education, Entertainment, Science, Medicine, Engineering, Distance Learning, Weather Forecasting. Carrier Searching and so on.
My project named “Event Management System” is software that store and maintained all events coordinated in college. It also helpful to print related reports. My project will help to record the events coordinated by faculties with their Name, Event subject, date & details in an efficient & effective ways.
In my system we have to make a system by which a user can record all events coordinated by a particular faculty. In our proposed system some more featured are added which differs it from the existing system such as security.
Overview of the fundamental roles in Hydropower generation and the components involved in wider Electrical Engineering.
This paper presents the design and construction of hydroelectric dams from the hydrologist’s survey of the valley before construction, all aspects and involved disciplines, fluid dynamics, structural engineering, generation and mains frequency regulation to the very transmission of power through the network in the United Kingdom.
Author: Robbie Edward Sayers
Collaborators and co editors: Charlie Sims and Connor Healey.
(C) 2024 Robbie E. Sayers
Vaccine management system project report documentation..pdfKamal Acharya
The Division of Vaccine and Immunization is facing increasing difficulty monitoring vaccines and other commodities distribution once they have been distributed from the national stores. With the introduction of new vaccines, more challenges have been anticipated with this additions posing serious threat to the already over strained vaccine supply chain system in Kenya.
Sachpazis:Terzaghi Bearing Capacity Estimation in simple terms with Calculati...Dr.Costas Sachpazis
Terzaghi's soil bearing capacity theory, developed by Karl Terzaghi, is a fundamental principle in geotechnical engineering used to determine the bearing capacity of shallow foundations. This theory provides a method to calculate the ultimate bearing capacity of soil, which is the maximum load per unit area that the soil can support without undergoing shear failure. The Calculation HTML Code included.
CFD Simulation of By-pass Flow in a HRSG module by R&R Consult.pptxR&R Consult
CFD analysis is incredibly effective at solving mysteries and improving the performance of complex systems!
Here's a great example: At a large natural gas-fired power plant, where they use waste heat to generate steam and energy, they were puzzled that their boiler wasn't producing as much steam as expected.
R&R and Tetra Engineering Group Inc. were asked to solve the issue with reduced steam production.
An inspection had shown that a significant amount of hot flue gas was bypassing the boiler tubes, where the heat was supposed to be transferred.
R&R Consult conducted a CFD analysis, which revealed that 6.3% of the flue gas was bypassing the boiler tubes without transferring heat. The analysis also showed that the flue gas was instead being directed along the sides of the boiler and between the modules that were supposed to capture the heat. This was the cause of the reduced performance.
Based on our results, Tetra Engineering installed covering plates to reduce the bypass flow. This improved the boiler's performance and increased electricity production.
It is always satisfying when we can help solve complex challenges like this. Do your systems also need a check-up or optimization? Give us a call!
Work done in cooperation with James Malloy and David Moelling from Tetra Engineering.
More examples of our work https://www.r-r-consult.dk/en/cases-en/
Industrial Training at Shahjalal Fertilizer Company Limited (SFCL)MdTanvirMahtab2
This presentation is about the working procedure of Shahjalal Fertilizer Company Limited (SFCL). A Govt. owned Company of Bangladesh Chemical Industries Corporation under Ministry of Industries.
About
Indigenized remote control interface card suitable for MAFI system CCR equipment. Compatible for IDM8000 CCR. Backplane mounted serial and TCP/Ethernet communication module for CCR remote access. IDM 8000 CCR remote control on serial and TCP protocol.
• Remote control: Parallel or serial interface.
• Compatible with MAFI CCR system.
• Compatible with IDM8000 CCR.
• Compatible with Backplane mount serial communication.
• Compatible with commercial and Defence aviation CCR system.
• Remote control system for accessing CCR and allied system over serial or TCP.
• Indigenized local Support/presence in India.
• Easy in configuration using DIP switches.
Technical Specifications
Indigenized remote control interface card suitable for MAFI system CCR equipment. Compatible for IDM8000 CCR. Backplane mounted serial and TCP/Ethernet communication module for CCR remote access. IDM 8000 CCR remote control on serial and TCP protocol.
Key Features
Indigenized remote control interface card suitable for MAFI system CCR equipment. Compatible for IDM8000 CCR. Backplane mounted serial and TCP/Ethernet communication module for CCR remote access. IDM 8000 CCR remote control on serial and TCP protocol.
• Remote control: Parallel or serial interface
• Compatible with MAFI CCR system
• Copatiable with IDM8000 CCR
• Compatible with Backplane mount serial communication.
• Compatible with commercial and Defence aviation CCR system.
• Remote control system for accessing CCR and allied system over serial or TCP.
• Indigenized local Support/presence in India.
Application
• Remote control: Parallel or serial interface.
• Compatible with MAFI CCR system.
• Compatible with IDM8000 CCR.
• Compatible with Backplane mount serial communication.
• Compatible with commercial and Defence aviation CCR system.
• Remote control system for accessing CCR and allied system over serial or TCP.
• Indigenized local Support/presence in India.
• Easy in configuration using DIP switches.
Cosmetic shop management system project report.pdfKamal Acharya
Buying new cosmetic products is difficult. It can even be scary for those who have sensitive skin and are prone to skin trouble. The information needed to alleviate this problem is on the back of each product, but it's thought to interpret those ingredient lists unless you have a background in chemistry.
Instead of buying and hoping for the best, we can use data science to help us predict which products may be good fits for us. It includes various function programs to do the above mentioned tasks.
Data file handling has been effectively used in the program.
The automated cosmetic shop management system should deal with the automation of general workflow and administration process of the shop. The main processes of the system focus on customer's request where the system is able to search the most appropriate products and deliver it to the customers. It should help the employees to quickly identify the list of cosmetic product that have reached the minimum quantity and also keep a track of expired date for each cosmetic product. It should help the employees to find the rack number in which the product is placed.It is also Faster and more efficient way.
Student information management system project report ii.pdfKamal Acharya
Our project explains about the student management. This project mainly explains the various actions related to student details. This project shows some ease in adding, editing and deleting the student details. It also provides a less time consuming process for viewing, adding, editing and deleting the marks of the students.
Automobile Management System Project Report.pdfKamal Acharya
The proposed project is developed to manage the automobile in the automobile dealer company. The main module in this project is login, automobile management, customer management, sales, complaints and reports. The first module is the login. The automobile showroom owner should login to the project for usage. The username and password are verified and if it is correct, next form opens. If the username and password are not correct, it shows the error message.
When a customer search for a automobile, if the automobile is available, they will be taken to a page that shows the details of the automobile including automobile name, automobile ID, quantity, price etc. “Automobile Management System” is useful for maintaining automobiles, customers effectively and hence helps for establishing good relation between customer and automobile organization. It contains various customized modules for effectively maintaining automobiles and stock information accurately and safely.
When the automobile is sold to the customer, stock will be reduced automatically. When a new purchase is made, stock will be increased automatically. While selecting automobiles for sale, the proposed software will automatically check for total number of available stock of that particular item, if the total stock of that particular item is less than 5, software will notify the user to purchase the particular item.
Also when the user tries to sale items which are not in stock, the system will prompt the user that the stock is not enough. Customers of this system can search for a automobile; can purchase a automobile easily by selecting fast. On the other hand the stock of automobiles can be maintained perfectly by the automobile shop manager overcoming the drawbacks of existing system.
Water scarcity is the lack of fresh water resources to meet the standard water demand. There are two type of water scarcity. One is physical. The other is economic water scarcity.
Creativity "Misrules": First Year Engineering Students’ Production and Perception of Creativity in Design Ideas
1. CREATIVITY
“MISRULES”
First Year Engineering Students’ Production &
Perception of Creativity in Design Ideas
Colin M. Gray1, Seda Yilmaz1, Shanna R. Daly2,
Colleen M. Seifert2, & Richard Gonzalez2
1 IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY
2 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
2. CREATIVITY & ENGINEERING
• Increase in design activities for first-year
engineering students (Dym & Little, 2004; Ogot & Okudan, 2006)
• Pedagogical tools and strategies have been
developed to increase creative potential
(Dym et al., 2005; Tolbert & Daly, 2013)
Specific barriers students face in learning how to be
creative are unclear (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; Tolbert & Daly, 2013)
3. KNOWN BARRIERS
• Fixation as one diagnostic outcome of the lack of
creative ability (Purcell & Gero, 1996)
• Tools can be used to effectively discourage
fixation and increase capability
(Daly et al., 2010; Smith & Linsey, 2011; Smith, Linsey, & Kerne, 2011)
• Inaccurate beliefs about creativity slow the
development of creative ability
4. “MISRULES”
• Inaccurate beliefs have been studied in other
educational domains as “bugs” or “misrules”
(Brown & VanLehn, 1980; Engelmann, 1993)
• Such beliefs are deeply held, and difficult to document
or change without deep knowledge of how beliefs are
built and systemically altered (Carnine & Becker, 2010)
We are assuming that students’ tacit biases about
creativity shape their labeling of designs as “creative,” and
may serve as a barrier to their creation and recognition of
truly novel and useful concepts
5. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
1. Where do first-year engineering students
identify their “most creative” idea in an idea
generation activity, when compared with all
generated concepts?
2. What characterizes the relationship between a
participant’s espoused belief about creativity
and their ordering of creative concepts?
3. Does Design Heuristics as a pedagogical tool
have an impact on the student’s perception of a
concept’s creativity?
7. DESIGN HEURISTICS
Provides prompts to help
designers generate
alternatives that vary in
nature, discouraging fixation
and encouraging divergent
patterns of thinking
(Yilmaz, Daly, Seifert, & Gonzalez,
2011; Yilmaz, Seifert, & Gonzalez,
2010)
Derived from empirical
evidence of industrial and
engineering designs
(Daly et al., 2012; Yilmaz, Christian,
Daly, Seifert, & Gonzalez, 2012;
Yilmaz & Seifert, 2010)
Validated through a range of
product analysis, case
studies, and protocol
analyses, in both
educational &
professional contexts
(e.g., Yilmaz & Seifert, 2009; Yilmaz et
al., 2011; Yilmaz et al., 2010; Yilmaz
et al., 2013; Yilmaz, Daly, Christian,
Seifert, & Gonzalez, 2014)
8. METHOD
• 156 first-year engineering students
• Two-day design-build-test activity prior to
matriculation at a large research university
• 85-minute idea generation session, using
brainstorming and Design Heuristics methods
• Survey on beliefs about creativity, ranking their
concepts from most to least creative
9. EXPERIMENTAL CONDITIONS
DESIGN PROBLEM
bike rack
FIXATION SOURCE
existing solution
DESIGN PROBLEM
bike rack
FIXATION SOURCE
self-generated solution
DESIGN PROBLEM
spill-proof coffee cup
FIXATION SOURCE
existing solution
DESIGN PROBLEM
spill-proof coffee cup
FIXATION SOURCE
self-generated solution
14. EXAMPLE CASE: BROOKE (I)
A section of the roof of the car can be
brought down so it is in the back seat
or the floor when the seats are down.
The bikes can be attached to the roof
on clamps that are located on the roof
already. Once attached, controls lift
the roof back into place, with the bikes
already secured.
MOST CREATIVE LEAST CREATIVE
15. EXAMPLE CASE: LINDA (IV)
MOST CREATIVE LEAST CREATIVE
The bike is fastened to a rack that is
just above ground level (attached with
locks like any normal bike). The
ground-level rack collapses to a rack
sticking off the back of the car, and
then the rack collapses in so the bike is
above the car.
16. CREATIVITY “MISRULES”
Creative Concepts Must Never Have
Been Thought Of Before
Creative Concepts Must Be As Little
Like Shipping Products as Possible.
Creative Concepts Are
Generally Impractical
Creative Concepts Must Be
Completely Creative
17. DESIGN HEURISTICS TO
COMBAT MISRULES
Creative Concepts Can Be Based
on Existing Ideas
Creative Concepts Can Improve
on Shipping Products
Creative Concepts Can Be Practical
Ordinary Concepts Can Have
Creative Components
18. THANK YOU
This research is funded by the National Science
Foundation, Division of Undergraduate Education,
Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (TUES
Type II) Grants # 1323251 and #1322552.
COLINGRAY.ME
DESIGNHEURISTICS.COM
Editor's Notes
First-year engineering students often fixate on ideas during the idea generation process, but it is unclear how they decide which of their concepts are most creative to pursue, and where their perceived “most creative” ideas occur in this process. These beliefs about creativity impact the ways in which students are able to conceive of and develop creative and novel solutions to the big engineering challenges of our age [1,2].
First year experiences for engineering students have been dramatically expanded in the past decade to include situated design activities, support for developing technical skill alongside mathematics and physics instruction, and team-based or collaborative design projects [3]. Engineering students have cited project-based learning as important to their understanding of the engineering discipline, and a lack of contextual experiences has been linked to lower retention [4], underscoring the importance of student engagement in authentic engineering activities. To this end, many scholars have suggested pedagogical tools and strategies to engage students in these early experiences [5,6], including curricular structures [7] and specific strategies to increase creative potential [8,9]. It is less clear, however, which specific barriers beginning students face in learning how to be creative, especially in relation to existing beliefs they hold regarding the nature of creativity [6,10].
The most frequent framing for the discussion of creativity and creative development in engineering education is the barrier known as fixation—the inability to create concepts that diverge from known examples [13,14]. As with the methods for encouraging the development of creativity, many of these methods have been used more directly to discourage fixation [15], such as through the generation of more, and more varied, concepts with Design Heuristics [16], analogical thinking [17,18], or the decomposition of existing products [11].
But within all of these approaches, particularly in addressing fixation as one diagnostic outcome of a student lacking creative ability, we don’t have a clear understanding of what students believe, perhaps inaccurately, about creativity and how those beliefs might influence behavior. Adequate knowledge of these processes is critical to helping students become more creative.
These issues of misconception or misdirected generalization have been addressed in the broader educational community, often through the lens of mathematics [e.g., 25,26] or educational philosophy [27]. Scholars in this area have highlighted how students come into the curriculum with “bugs” [25] or “misrules” [26] that they then apply in their work. These intrinsic beliefs are deeply held, and are difficult to change without direct instruction [26,28]. In particular, the misrules that students use, or perform, in learning activities are difficult to address apart from a systemic correction of the misrules through worked examples, similar to the student- or artifact-centered desk critique common in most design disciplines [28]. We view misconceptions about creativity through much the same lens, assuming that students’ tacit biases about creativity shape their labeling of designs as “creative,” and may serve as a barrier to their creation and recognition of truly novel and useful concepts [29,30].
Our goal in this study was to explore student-identified “most creative” concepts by examining the temporal emergence of beliefs about creativity, production of design concepts, and idea generation methods. Within this framing, our analysis assesses the following research questions:
Participants were exposed to two idea generation techniques: brainstorming and Design Heuristics during an 85-minute session. Students were asked to individually generate concepts for one of two engineering problems: a bike rack and a spill-proof coffee cup [13]. These two problems were chosen based on their previous use in the research literature to investigate creative idea generation in an engineering context. Students were also exposed to two different forms of idea fixation: a provided existing design solution to the problem given, and their own first ideas they generated prior to formal ideation. Each of the four experimental conditions, comprised of the two problem types and two forms of fixation, were carried out in separate sessions with a random subset of participants. In all subsets, students first used traditional brainstorming techniques in the first half of the session, generating as many ideas as possible. In the second half, the Design Heuristics method was introduced, and students were asked to use a randomly selected subset of the Design Heuristics cards to generate as many additional concepts as possible for the same problem. At the conclusion of the activity, students were asked to complete a short survey and rank all of the concepts they had generated through both methods from most to least creative, along with identifying generated concepts that were similar to the fixation source (either participant-created or provided). Participants then completed a survey about their beliefs on creativity.
Students were also exposed to two different forms of idea fixation: a provided existing design solution to the problem given, and their own first ideas they generated prior to formal ideation. Each of the four experimental conditions, comprised of the two problem types and two forms of fixation, were carried out in separate sessions with a random subset of participants.
In all subsets, students first used traditional brainstorming techniques in the first half of the session, generating as many ideas as possible. In the second half, the Design Heuristics method was introduced, and students were asked to use a randomly selected subset of the Design Heuristics cards to generate as many additional concepts as possible for the same problem.
Our initial analysis focused primarily on (1) the temporal location of the concept that each participant rated as most creative, (2) the method the participant used, and (3) the qualities of the most creative concept in relation to other concepts by that participant.
We then calculated the relative location of the identified “most creative” concept for each participant within the 85-minute idea generation activity (Figure 2). If the most creative concept was identified within the brainstorming (BS) phase, the variable ranged from -1 to 0; similarly, if the most creative concept was identified in the Design Heuristics (DH) phase, the variable ranged from 0 to +1. To further situate the location of the most creative concept without having tracked the actual time of creation, the variable range was divided by the total number of concepts each participant generated in that phase, and the midpoint of the most creative concept was calculated numerically. Without any data on the exact creation time for each concept, calculating an average allowed us to compare relative positions for further analysis. For instance, if a participant generated three concepts in the brainstorming phase and the middle concept was chosen as the most creative, the corresponding most creative concept variable would be calculated as -0.5.
Using this calculated variable, we then divided each method phase once more, to separate all participants that identified their most creative concept in the first or second half of each method, relative to the total number of concepts generated in that phase by each participant. This process yielded four subsets: I-BS (n=21), II-BS (n=54), III-DH (n=50), and IV-DH (n=31). Descriptive statistical analysis was performed on each subset (Table 1).
Summary of descriptive stats for each subset, which we used to derive exemplary cases.
The 156 participants included in our analysis comprised 102 male and 54 female students, 17 to 18 years of age. In total, these participants generated 1134 concepts (M=7.27; SD=2.69; min=2; max=15) across both idea generation methods. Participants in the four subsets were equally distributed across problem and fixation types.
Using these descriptive statistics (Table 1), we can explore several characteristics of participants who identified their “most creative concept” from various portions of the overall ideation exercise. Table 1 includes the number of participants in each subset, the mean location for the “most creative” and “least creative” concepts, and the mean number of concepts generated within each idea generation method. Participants in II generated more total concepts (M=8.01) than participants in IV (M=7.61), with participants in the other two phases generating fewer concepts (I: M=6.95; III: M=6.40).
Finally, we selected a corresponding representative case from each subset, with the resulting four cases including diversity of gender, total number of concepts generated, and location of the participant-identified most creative concept. Each of these cases will be presented in a later section, including further analysis of the progression of ideas in relation to the source of fixation, the nature of the relationship of the most creative concept to the fixation source, and stated beliefs regarding creativity from the exit survey in relation to the concepts generated.
Brooke is an 18-year-old female who generated concepts for the bike rack problem. In total, she generated eight concepts—four in each phase—after receiving an example bike rack solution as a form of priming fixation. Brooke labeled her most creative concept (Figure 4, left) as a moveable bike rack:
This bike rack represents an impractical idea—in that it modifies the car itself—but is seen by Brooke as a more creative option than her lowest ranked concept (Figure 4, right), a modification of the mounting portion of the rack: “The bike rack can be folded in half when it is not being used. The supports are folded down into ‘x's’. These supports are then used in multiple ways & different positions.” Within the overall ranking of concepts (from most creative to least creative), only one of the top five creative concepts out of the 8 concepts proposed was generated using the Design Heuristics method; solutions included the moveable roof (n=1), adjustable attachments for wheel mounting (n=2), a rack embedded into the top of the roof (n=1), and a multipurpose portion of the rack that could be used as a stepping stool (n=1). Only this final concept was created using Design Heuristics, with heuristic #10 (“allow user to reconfigure”). All three of the lowest ranked concepts were generated using Design Heuristics, with two of the three also indicated as being similar to the example fixation concept. Solutions included an indent in the car roof (n=1), a portion of the rack that can attach and pull a bike up from ground level (n=1), and the foldable rack (n=1).
Brooke described her approach to assessing creativity in her concepts as follows: “The concepts that I consider more creative are the ones that seem less practical/ realistic. They are harder to design, but much easier to use.” This belief about creativity is borne out in her highest ranked concepts. While the progressive improvements suggested in some lower ranked concepts might represent more creative pathways (e.g., using a portion of the rack as a step stool), the least realistic concept—requiring the most modification to the vehicle itself—was judged as “most creative.” Brooke’s conception of progressive enhancement seems to reinforce her beliefs about what constitutes a creative concept—where similar concepts are those where “I used the same type of design in a new way.” In her summary regarding learning about idea generation in the activity, she again linked unrealistic ideas with creativity: “I learned that unrealistic ideas can be used to generate a very realistic/creative product.”
The concepts Brooke created when using the Design Heuristics cards represented more incremental changes from the example fixation this group was provided; three of the four concepts generated with this method were marked as similar to the example concept—and presumably, based on the creativity ranking Brooke provided—less creative than the more divergent ideas generated in the brainstorming phase. The specific application of Design Heuristics was often unclear in Brooke’s concepts. While her use of #10 (“allow user to reconfigure”) was clearly evident in her repurposing of the rack as a stepping stool, other uses, such as #73 (“multiple components for one function”) for the lowest ranked foldable rack, provided less insight into how Brooke conceptualized the use of heuristics in relation to her concept.
Linda is an 18-year-old female who generated concepts for the bike rack problem. In total, she generated nine concepts—five in the brainstorming phase, and four in the Design Heuristics phase—after receiving an example bike rack solution as a form of priming fixation. The concept Linda identified as her most creative (Figure 9, left) was a rack that moved the bike from ground level to the top of the car:
This concept was created at the end of the Design Heuristics phase, using heuristic #65 (“telescope”) to define horizontal and vertical “collapsing” of the moveable rack in order to facilitate movement of the bike on the car. Linda’s lowest ranked concept (Figure 9, right) was a more traditional rack concept, using magnets to attach the rack to the vehicle and bicycle to the rack. Three of her top four concepts were generated using Design Heuristics, including the top-ranked moveable rack (1), a rectangular prism used to hold the bike into place (1; using #66—“texturize”), and fastening the bike on its side rather than standing up (1; using #75—“use recycled or recyclable materials”),). Her bottom three ranked concepts, all of which were generated during the brainstorming phase, included ways to move the bike into place automatically (2) and the use of magnets to attach the rack (1). The center two concepts included another iteration of the moveable rack generated using brainstorming, and a collapsible roof area to contain the bike, generated using Design Heuristics #65 (“telescope”).
Linda enunciated the broadest definition of creativity of these four cases, asserting:
My most creative concepts came from the heuristics cards. They allowed me to think outside of the box and come up with new ideas. I also think that not analyzing while brainstorming helped me significantly. It allowed me to get my ideas down before comparing it to others.
She noted that she had seen bike racks attached to the top and back of cars before, and this may explain two of her moving rack concepts from the brainstorming phase where the rack originates at the back of the vehicle, both of which she marked as being similar to the priming example. Linda directly cites the Design Heuristics cards as an aid in more divergent ideation, noting that the brainstorming concepts “are very similar because I did not have the heuristic cards (so I did not think as much out of the box).”
Linda appears to make use of Design Heuristics in refining earlier concepts that were generated in the brainstorming phase—making the specific function that she had initially documented clearer or better designed. For instance, the telescoping motion Linda describes in her last and highest ranked concept, where the rack collapses in a vertical, then horizontal direction, was present in her very first concept of the brainstorming phase (which was ranked eighth). The highest ranked concept includes a specific way for the rack to change positions, while in the lower ranked, only a general movement along a track is described. Interestingly, Linda notes the similarity of two other concepts—both from the brainstorming phase (Figure 10)—that include some movement of the rack from the side or back of the car to the top; but even though this general concept of movement is shared with the top-rated concept, no similarity is noted in that concept. As such, Linda appears to demonstrate some preference for concepts generated later, even where the core idea was articulated earlier, albeit with less specificity.
Creative Concepts Must Never Have Been Thought Of Before. This misrule is best demonstrated by Clark, who assessed creativity based on whether “ive [sic] seen it before.” This belief about creativity often leads to a weak chain of iteration between concepts, with a particular struggle in generating an initial concept that is judged sufficiently “creative” vis-à-vis existing concepts on which to begin generating alternatives [31]. In practice, as demonstrated by Brooke, this misrule can lead to outlier concepts that disregard identified constraints (e.g., moveable roof to attach and lift bike), which are difficult to assess or iterate from.
2. Creative Concepts Must Be As Little Like Shipping Products as Possible. Starting with this misrule, participants judge existing solutions—no matter how novel—as uncreative, although often tacitly so. Instead of being able to identify components or approaches of existing products that may be modified to create an equally creative concept, participants attempt to create concepts that are extremely different from existing products on the market (e.g., Andy’s gourd-shaped vessel with a cork).
3. Creative Concepts Are Generally Impractical. Embedded within this misrule is the latent assumption that existing concepts are practical concepts—in other words, they are technologically or economically possible. So therefore, concepts which are not currently possible, due to available materials and manufacturing processes, or other factors, must inherently be creative.
4. Creative Concepts Must Be Completely Creative. This misrule is perhaps the most nuanced, but can have a dramatic effect on the quality of divergence that students are able to create in their concepts. Similar to the first two misrules, this one starts with the tacit assumption that the product must not have been thought of before, or be totally different than existing products. Within this perspective, embodied by all four cases to some degree, the holistic product is being assessed—and its match to other holistic products. This leaves out the opportunity for progressive enhancement through the creative addition of a component or product function, and results in potentially creative solutions that bridge off of existing products being seen as not very creative, at least in comparison to “completely new” concepts.
For example, even in the case of Linda—an otherwise exemplary case—we see a pathway of concepts that is not entirely realized; while creative ideas emerged very early in the idea generation process, she did not recognize this idea as creative (as evidenced by her ranking) until the technical issues surrounding specific functional concerns were addressed, often one or two iterations after the core idea was created.
While many of these misrules are deeply embedded in students’ approach to generating and assessing ideas, Design Heuristics has been successfully used to promote the generation of divergent concepts in engineering contexts, producing a greater quantity of concepts which are of higher quality than other concepts produced through brainstorming alone. Because the focus of Design Heuristics is the application of heuristics to generate early design solutions, which function as modifiers to existing design concepts, it is an ideal tool to communicate the nature of idea pathways, and the relationship of these pathways to the misrules discussed above. We will briefly discuss how Design Heuristics may be used—not only as an idea generation tool, but also as a guided instructional tool to directly combat misrules about creativity.
Creative Concepts Can Be Based On Existing Ideas. To demonstrate that iterating from existing concepts can generate creative concepts, Design Heuristics can be used to progressively transform an existing concept into a revolutionary one by applying a different heuristic in each stage to alter some component or portion of the concept [34]. By comparing the starting and ending concepts, the student can then articulate the idea pathways that were followed, demonstrating that even a series of small changes can result in the complete transformation of a concept [35].
Creative Concepts Can Improve on Shipping Products. Through progressive enhancement or component redesign, Design Heuristics can be used to identify and reimagine components of an existing, successful product, resulting in a related product that is creative in its own right. Decomposition techniques such as functional decomposition or morphological analysis can be used to identify a range of components within a larger design. Through the selection of a specific component, such as an existing “pain point,” a scoped idea generation activity can be framed, allowing the student to reimagine that component in isolation, encouraging the development of alternatives to an existing approaches.
Creative Concepts Can Be Practical. An approach to address this misrule might be to identify what is truly innovative about the concept. Qualities of materiality and functionality can both be countered through targeted ideation, either through adaptation of extant morphological analysis approaches, or through adoption of a subset of Design Heuristics cards. The sci-fi or futuristic concept can also be beneficial, but must be redirected into implications for concepts that are actually possible to create; for instance, what social or experiential qualities of a given “fantasy” device might be desirable, and how those qualities might map (in preliminary form) to products that can be designed [36,37].
Ordinary Concepts Can Have Creative Components. Similar to the improvement of existing products, seemingly ordinary products can contain highly creative components. Decomposition techniques may be used to identify such components in existing products, which can then be applied in new and unexpected contexts. Design Heuristics can also be a useful tool in combining ideas or components from multiple products, including strategies for synthesizing functions or recognizing and altering the use qualities of a product based on external or contextually-dependent characteristics. Students appear to confuse “novel” as the sole criterion for creative, while “useful” or “having value” is another [38] As a result, they may reject concepts with familiar components even though highly novel components are included.