COLLABORATIVE IDEA GENERATION USING DESIGN HEURISTICS

Creative strategies play a central role in successful concept generation; however, few studies have documented the application of creative strategies in engineering design. From protocol studies of engineering and industrial designers, heuristics, or cognitive shortcuts, were identified that support novel and diverse concept generation [1]. In this study, professional engineers from a manufacturing company participated in a small group innovation workshop using the developed "Design Heuristics." The team was videotaped as they worked with the instructional cards we developed based on the heuristics. This paper reports on the investigation of the design team's idea generation process with five of the cards, analyzing the diversity of their ideas, how Design Heuristics were used, and their role in stimulating both new design solutions and problems. The introduction of a specific design heuristic often guided designers to a different part of the design space, and facilitated them in considering other unprompted heuristics.