The Impact of Team-Based Product Dissection on Design Novelty

Abstract

Although design novelty is a critical area of research in engineering design, most research in this space has focused on understanding and developing formal idea generation methods instead of focusing on the impact of current design practices. This is problematic because formal techniques are often not adopted in industry due to the burdensome steps often included in these methods, which limit the practicality and adoption of these methods. This study seeks to understand the impact of product dissection, a design method widely utilized in academia and industry, on design novelty in order to produce recommendations for the use or alterations of this method for supporting novelty in design. To investigate the impact of dissection, a study was conducted with 76 engineering students who completed a team-based dissection of an electric toothbrush and then individually generated ideas. The relationships between involvement in the dissection activity, the product dissected, the novelty and quantity of the ideas developed were investigated. The results reveal that team members who were more involved in the dissection activity generated concepts that were more novel than those who did not. In addition, the type of the dissected product also had an influence on design novelty. Finally, a positive correlation between the number of ideas generated and the novelty of the design concepts was identified. The results from this study are used to provide recommendations for leveraging product dissection for enhancing novelty in engineering design education and practice.

A state-transition model of team conceptual design activity

“…The prescriptive research has primarily been aimed at boosting creativity and productivity, but also overcoming fixation and bias (please consult Gonçalves et al 2014;Vasconcelos and Crilly 2016;Petersson and Lundberg 2018;Nikander et al 2014; and Toh and Miller 2016b for more details on recent findings concerning these issues). Although there are many formalised methods developed for ideation and concept selection, it is often suggested that designers prefer working informally rather than using the less intuitive and imposed methods (Toh et al 2014;Nikander et al 2014). Understanding the designers' natural and intuitive approach to designing (both the cognitive and the observable process) is essential in providing teams better support during activities such as ideation and concept review.…”

A novel systematic approach for analysing exploratory design ideation

“…The predominant solution-focused systematic approach, originally outlined by Shah, Smith, and Vargas-Hernandez (2003), has been applied (e.g. Wilson et al 2010;Verhaegen et al 2011;Sun, Yao, and Carretero 2014;Toh, Miller, and Okudan Kremer 2014;Sluis-Thiescheffer et al 2016;Toh and Miller 2016) and modified (e.g. Nelson et al 2009;Peeters et al 2010;Verhaegen et al 2013;Sluis-Thiescheffer et al 2016;Rotini 2018a, 2018b) by a multitude of authors over the past fifteen years.…”

IDC Robocon: A Transnational Teaming Competition for Project-Based Design Education in Undergraduate Robotics

“…As for many other design education events [27,28], IDC RoboCon is also a team-based design competition where university students from all parts of the world gather to share ideas and knowledge on robotics and develop winning robots. The objective of the competition is to foster and develop creativity, technique and international experience of young future engineers.…”