Design Creativity
Research during my PhD
Research area: Design creativity
Dissertation: Development of a support for effective concept exploration to enhance the creativity of engineering designers.
The research aimed to enhance creativity of engineering designers by providing a support that encourages exploration and search of new concept spaces in the conceptual phase of design by applying appropriate triggers.
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 was a lack of a commonly agreed definition, measures, and influences of creativity against which methods for its enhancement could be evaluated and benchmarked. Moreover, there was 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 was not clearly known.
Comprehensive understanding of creativity: First, my PhD supervisor and I, examined a comprehensive set of definitions of creativity, proposed by various researchers and practitioners, and synthesized them into a common definition of creativity [1]. Next, we reviewed a collection of creativity measures, factors influencing creativity, and creativity enhancing methods and linked them to the common definition of creativity. 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 usable 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 companywide creativity encouraging environment; the common enhancing methods should help designers to develop creative solutions. We have also found that understanding creativity would require conducting many design experiments, which require a substantial amount of time to transcribe and analyze design protocols. 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 [2].
Assessing creativity: The common definition of creativity is ‘creativity occurs through a process by which an agent uses its ability to generate problems, solutions, and evaluations that are novel and useful.’ Thus, the core components of creativity are ‘novelty’ and ‘usefulness’. Next, we propose methods for assessing creativity of products by assessing the relative degree of novelty and usefulness of these products. We have also evaluated these proposed methods with experienced designers [3].
Method for search and exploration: Next, through the analysis of many design experiments using designers from various design firms, we understood the mechanism of search and exploration by designers. Different search types occurring in all phases of conceptual design are identified. Creative efficacy of designers has been studied in relation to the kinds and amounts of searches taken place during the design process, leading to the establishment of relationships of creativity with other factors such as experience, search characteristics and time [4]. 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. We have also shown how depending upon the amount and search types occurring in a design process, efficacy of different idea generating methods and designers quality could be determined.
Trigger or stimulus: Systems in natural and artificial worlds and their functionality are seen as rich sources of inspiration for idea generation. We have developed a triggering process that will enable the designers to use many related triggers from artificial and natural designs. While trying to find how exactly triggering takes place - we have found that the past knowledge of 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 explore or search different design spaces, and presence of triggers point out the spaces to search. Methods that help designers to explore different search spaces is also developed where triggers from a software (idea inspire) has been provided [5]. 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 and 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 a significant influence of the representation of the triggers, both on the representations, number, and quality of the resulting ideas generated [6].
Support development: From the understanding of the way, the search takes place in design and how exactly the presence of triggers can aid designers search design spaces, we develop a tool based on the combination of the individual methods that have been developed in the search and trigger part of this research. This 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. Next, we have evaluated the tool with experts from many design firms. The results showed an increase in both quality and quantity of the solutions produced.
[1] Prabir Sarkar and Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2008. Studying engineering design creativity- developing a common definition and associated measures. In, John Gero (Ed.) Studying Design Creativity, Springer Verlag, 2008.
[2] Prabir Sarkar and Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2010. Supporting design research through a protocol analyzing tool - Idea Transcribe. Submitted to Artifact. Taylor and Francis.
[3] Prabir Sarkar and Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2010. Assessing design creativity: Measure of novelty and usefulness. Design Studies, Elsevier (accepted).
[4] Prabir Sarkar, Amaresh Chakrabarti, 2007. Understanding search in design, International conference on engineering design, ICED’07, 28 - 31 August 2007, Paris.
[5] 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, Issue - 2. Cambridge.
[6] 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.