PhD thesis title: Development of a support for effective concept exploration to enhance creativity of engineering designers
Research supervisor: Amaresh Chakrabarti, Professor, CPDM, IISc, Bangalore, India
Research done at: Centre of Product Design and Manufacturing (CPDM), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India.

Thesis abstract

Aim
This research aims to enhance creativity of engineering designers by providing a support that encourages exploration and search of new concept spaces in the initial (conceptual) phase of design by applying appropriate triggers.

Importance
Creativity, a major controlling parameter for generating successful products in engineering design, is actualized through search for and of design-spaces. Designers frequently explore and search these design spaces.

Though a large body of literature exists in the field of creativity, there is a lack of a commonly agreed definition and a commonly accepted set of measures and influences on creativity against which methods for its enhancement could be evaluated and benchmarked. Also there is a lack of understanding of the process of actualization of search, through which designers generate solutions. The process of triggering and how it helps designers to search solution spaces is also not clearly known.

We have also found that understanding creativity would require conducting many design experiments which requires substantial amount of time to transcribe and analyze. Presently the tools available were not optimal for protocol analysis. We have developed a support for analyzing design activities through transcribing and analyzing of design protocols. This tool we have used during the analysis of experiments especially while understanding the process of search and triggering.

Creativity
First this work examines a comprehensive set of definitions of creativity, proposed by various researchers and practitioners, and synthesizes their common features into a common definition of creativity using two different methods. Next, it reviews a comprehensive collection of creativity measures, categorizes them into clusters of similar measures and links them with this definition of creativity. Next, this work reviews the various factors influencing creativity as identified by researchers, as well as a comprehensive collection of creativity enhancing methods available in literature. These factors are then linked on one hand with the proposed definition of creativity and on the other with the creativity enhancing methods, so that the methods could be chosen and used to exert specific influences on creativity.

The common definition of creativity, providing a potentially operationalizable notion of creativity, should help identification of creative products with the help of the common measures. The common factors should assist design firms to focus on these to achieve a company wide creativity encouraging environment; the common enhancing methods should help designers to develop creative solutions.

Creativity measure
Creativity occurs through a process by which an agent uses its ability to generate problems, ideas, products or solutions and evaluations that are novel and useful. The core components of creativity are ‘novelty’ and ‘usefulness’. Initially existing methods on measuring ‘novelty’ and ‘usefulness’ are reviewed. Next, work proposes a method for assessing creativity of technical products by assessing their relative degree of novelty and usefulness.

The proposed method is evaluated by comparing with existing novelty measuring methods and the intuitive notion of designers. It shows that the proposed method reflects the experienced designers’ intuitive notion of novelty of products better than other, existing methods. The proposed method can also be used to assess the non-obviousness of products.

Search
First, past research is surveyed in order to explore the current definitions, importance and understanding of the phenomena of search and exploration, and gaps in research in these areas are identified. Next, through design experiments, an in-depth understanding of the process of search and exploration has been sought. Different general search types occurring in all phases of conceptual design is identified. Creative efficacy of designers has been studied in relation to the kinds and amounts of search taken place during the design process, leading to the establishment of relationships of creativity with other factors such as experience, search characteristics and time.

Finally, guidelines are proposed in order to help designers check their progress towards better designs by controlling the outcomes of the design process proactively during the early design phases. Next from this understanding a design method has been developed that helps designers to consciously find design spaces by activating different kinds of searches to generate potential solutions. Next, we have shown how depending upon the amount and search types occurring in a design process, efficacy of different idea generating methods and designers quality can be determined.

Trigger
Inspiration is useful for exploration and discovery of new solution spaces. It has been seen that systems in natural and artificial worlds and their functionality are seen as rich sources of inspiration for idea generation. Experiments at validating a generic model for representing causality of natural and artificial systems (developed earlier) indicate substantial potential for triggering designers for generating solutions. In realization evaluation and modification of these solutions are carried out by experimenting with these in virtual and physical forms and environments.

Next, we have developed a triggering process that will enable the designers use all the related triggers. While trying to find how exactly triggering takes place - we have found that past knowledge of an systems or products (gained through learning and experience) is matched with that of the problem requirement and presence of triggers generally helps designers to help identify these systems. Generation of problems, solution and evaluation takes place when designers explores or searches different design spaces, and presence of triggers point out the spaces to search. Method that helps designers to explore different search spaces is also developed where triggers from a software (idea inspire) has been provided.

Both representation and content of the triggers or stimulus that the designers are exposed to are believed to plays a vital role in the representation and content of the outcome of the designers during problem solving. Using design experiments the effect of a variety of representations (video/ animation and audio, text, explanation and others) on designers, for a set of pre-specified triggers are administered is studied. The effect of representations of these triggers on the content and representation of the solutions generated by the design engineers is noted. The results show significant influence of the representation of the triggers, both on the representations, number and quality of the resulting ideas generated.

Method development
From the understanding of way the search takes place in design and how exactly the presence of triggers can aid designers search design spaces, a tool has been developed based on the combination of the individual method that has been developed in the search and trigger part of this research. The tool aims to aid designers in solving any engineering problems (implemented to solve mechanical and electro mechanical problems) through the application of suitable triggers, helping them to explore and search design spaces.

Initial evaluation of the method has been completed with in-house novice designers. Next, we have evaluated this with experts from many design firms. Next, the designers are requested to continue solving the same set of problems with the tool given as computer aided support. The creative outcomes are measured using the creativity measuring method. The results showed increase in both quality and quantity of the solutions produced.

Some outcome that came out of this study:

Publications:

1. Prabir Sarkar and Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2010. Assessing design creativity: Measure of novelty and usefulness. Design Studies, DS, Elsevier
2. Prabir Sarkar, Phaneendra S, Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2008. Developing engineering products using inspiration from nature. Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, JCISE. Vol. 8, No. 3. ASME. (http://asudesign.eas.asu.edu/links/journal/ thirdissue_vol_8.html)
3. Prabir Sarkar and Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2007. The effect of representation of triggers on design outcomes. Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design and Manufacturing, AIEDAM. Journal’s special issue on multi-modal design. Vol 22. Isseue -2. Cambridge.  (http://journals.cambridge.org/ action/displayIssue?jid =AIE&volumeId= 22&issueId=02&iid =1807924)
4. Amaresh Chakrabarti, Prabir Sarkar, B. Leelavathamma, B.S. Nataraju, 2005, A functional representation for aiding biomimetic and artificial inspiration of new ideas. Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design and Manufacturing, AIEDAM.  Vol 19, Isseue - 2. Cambridge. (http://journals.cambridge.org/ action/displayAbstract? fromPage =online&aid=330433)
5. Prabir Sarkar, Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2008. Analyzing creativity methods, International Conference on Research in Design, ICORD 2009.
6. Prabir Sarkar, Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2007. Development of a method for assessing design creativity, International conference on engineering design, ICED’07, 28 - 31 August 2007, Paris.
7. Prabir Sarkar, Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2007. Understanding search in design, International conference on engineering design, ICED’07, 28 - 31 August 2007, Paris.
8. Prabir Sarkar, Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2007. Developing novel technical systems using ideas from nature, International conference on engineering design, ICED’07, 28 - 31 August 2007, Paris.
9. Prabir Sarkar, Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2007.A tool for supporting protocol analysis, International Conference on Engineering Design, ICED’07, 28 - 31 August 2007, Paris.

Software tool:

• Idea-Transcribe – an aid for design researchers for transcribing protocols (VB, Media player, Spreadsheet)
• Idea-Trigger – an aid to trigger ideas (VB, VC++, OpenGL)