A suitable quality metric is essential to improving ideation effectiveness. Many proposed quality metrics struggle to adequately capture this critical, subjective concept in a reliable and efficient way. This paper shows our development and testing of a quality metric that is meaningful, repeatable, and efficient. This quality metric is a weighted sum of quality dimensions adapted from the literature. The weighting factors for each dimension are adjusted to the specific ideation problem, and we present here a systematic method to quickly determine these weightings by experimental means. We demonstrate repeatability of the quality metric through interrater reliability, we show meaningfulness by comparing with raters’ intuitive interpretation of quality, and we demonstrate efficiency in the rating process. These initial findings show the quality metric has great promise and merits additional testing and refinement in future work.
This paper studies how engineering education might change divergent thinking skills. We hypothesized that people use a higher amount of divergent thinking when a task is unfamiliar. Our previous work developed an online survey to measure divergent ideation in two ways: with one ideation task, equally familiar to both novice and experienced designers, and a second ideation task, familiar only to experienced designers. We sorted ideas from 40 engineering upperclassmen and 40 freshmen into hierarchical categories and scored fluency, flexibility, and originality. The results did not confirm our hypothesis; rather, we found that originality scores were not significantly different between freshman and upperclassmen. Additionally, both groups produced their most-original ideas in the generally-familiar ideation task. Limitations in our methods prevented meaningful conclusions about flexibility, and further study will be necessary to confirm our other conclusions. To better explore factors influencing divergent thinking, we will refine our methods for future work and retest the participants from the freshmen group in a longitudinal study.
Individual designers demonstrate different styles of ideation in conceptual design. These styles have been quantified and described primarily through protocol, think-aloud studies that examine a designer’s thought sequence during ideation. In this paper, we examine ideation style with an outcome-based approach, examining style on a continuum of rate of variety, or solution space exploration rate. We investigate the relationship between this exploration rate and creativity factors of quality and novelty using a quantitative study of problem-solving skills. We found a significant positive correlation between broad-search style and novelty and a significant positive correlation between detail-search style and quality of ideas. These correlations are in agreement with protocol studies found in literature. We also identified quantity of ideas as a possible confounding factor and discuss potential improvements to these types of studies.
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