MEASURING AND COMPARING THE EFFECTS OF DESIGN INTERVENTIONS ON IDEATION FLEXIBILITY
Open Access
- Author:
- Henderson, Daniel Allen
- Area of Honors:
- Interdisciplinary in Engineering Design and Engineering Science
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Kathryn Weed Jablokow, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Sven G Bilén, Thesis Honors Advisor
Osama O Awadelkarim, Thesis Honors Advisor
Judith A Todd Copley, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- engineering science
engineering design
ideation flexibility
ideation - Abstract:
- This thesis is divided into two studies on ideation in design. The first study measures and compares the effects of design interventions on ideation, and the second compares and contrasts methods for assessing the variety within a group of design ideas. Examining the effects of design interventions is important because design interventions are intended to impact the way engineers and designers ideate. While there have been several studies done to examine the effects of design interventions with small samples and one or two specific metrics, they have been relatively narrow in focus and there has not yet been an overarching comparison to get a wider perspective. This study looks across samples and metrics to see what large-scale effects design interventions have, especially in comparison to one other. Additionally, variety is an important attribute of design ideas, because it indicates the extent to which the solution space has been explored. There is a greater likelihood of successfully solving a design problem when a more diverse set of ideas is generated in the early stages of design. While there are three popular existing metrics for variety, it has not been established how well they correlate with each other, so it is unknown whether they provide similar assessments of variety. This uncertainty inspired the investigation of the three existing metrics and, eventually, the development of a new variety metric—all of which were compared statistically and qualitatively. In particular, 966 design ideas collected from 155 engineering students and 104 design ideas collected from 29 engineering students were analyzed for the interventions study and the variety study, respectively. Paired t-tests and correlation analyses were used to investigate relationships between the values of interest. The qualitative differences were also considered among the variety metrics, along with where they might be used most effectively. In the interventions study, there were paired relationships and correlations found primarily for the teaming intervention that provide insights into how teaming affects ideation flexibility. In the variety study, there were varying levels of statistically significant correlations among the four metrics, indicating that they are dependent. Even so, each metric offers a unique perspective on variety and may be useful in different situations. The interventions study has implications for design education in terms of gathering insights about how design interventions affect students, which can lead to improvements in future design interventions. The variety study has implications for design theory and methodology in terms of having a better understanding how existing variety metrics relate to one another as well as developing a new variety metric with which ideas can be evaluated.