A Case-Study Analysis of Design Heuristics in an Upper-Level Cross-Disciplinary Design Course

Abstract

is a senior in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. She has been working in design research for over a year, studying idea generation tools, design problems for experimental studies, and the ways in which teams work from ideation to prototypes. Her research interests include creativity and innovation in engineering, the intersection between engineering education and design, and the investigation of local users and stakeholders through ethnographic data collection. Julia also has experience as an undergraduate Instructional Aide working as a liaison between communities in Detroit and engineering students at Michigan. She works in two courses: a first-year design course related to urban agriculture and an upper-level cross-disciplinary design course focusing on engaged urban design.

How do designers generate new ideas? Design heuristics across two disciplines

“…2012 b ; Kramer et al. 2014) and industrial design (Yilmaz et al. 2012), showing the successful use of design heuristics in both groups (Yilmaz et al.…”

Modeling a Strategic Human Engineering Design Process: Human-Inspired Heuristic Guidance Through Learned Visual Design Agents

“…They noticed direct positive correlation between designs which showed clear use of these heuristics and a high level of creativity, novelty, and expansive solution search similar to expert designers. Kramer et al (2014) further explored the research of Daly and Christian, showing that these generalized design heuristics are applicable across multiple design domains. This finding confirms that although the strategic concepts contained within generalized heuristics may take alternative forms depending on the specific domain, the strategies themselves may still prove helpful for inspiring expansive and effective solution search.…”

Formal System for the Expression of Target-Oriented Design Heuristics

“…Second, design heuristics may be either what we chose to call here undirected or target-oriented. The 39 "principles of invention" and the heuristics published by Kramer et al (2014) are of the first type. They help "jumping in a new subspace of possible solutions" (Yilmaz and Seifert, 2011) without judging about the compliance of these solutions to any requirement.…”

“…Sets of targetoriented heuristics particularly provide pools of possible solution approaches corresponding to a given design objective-what Dahlström (1999) calls an "advice bank". Those sets are mostly documented as unordered (as in Bischof and Blessing, 2008;Bonvoisin et al, 2010) or categorized lists (as in Go et al, 2015) and can be alternatively presented as cards (as in Kramer et al, 2014) or mind maps (as in Telenko et al, 2016, to some extent). In some fewer examples, heuristics are stored in databases offering more complex structures and filtering possibilities (Bauer, 2003;Russo et al, 2017).…”