Design Heuristics in Engineering Concept Generation

Observations on concept generation and sketching in engineering design

The generation of ideas is an essential element in the process of design. One suggested approach to improving the quality of ideas is through increasing their quantity. In this study, concept generation is examined via brainstorming, morphology charts and sketching. Statistically significant correlations were found between the quantity of brainstormed ideas and design outcome. In some, but not ...

Design Heuristics in Ideation across Engineering and Industrial Design Domains

How do designers explore a design space to generate diverse solutions? This work focuses on the identification of design heuristics used in the ideation process in the domains of industrial design and engineering design. Design heuristics are cognitive strategies applied to a design problem to help designers create novel solutions. In a think-aloud protocol, engineers and industrial designers w...

Concept Generation for Persuasive Design

Designing ‘persuasive’ products and services for social benefit often involves adopting and adapting principles and patterns from other disciplines and contexts where behaviour change is a goal. This poster briefly reports on a series of controlled trials of an idea generation toolkit which aims to make this transposition of patterns easier, with designers and students applying the toolkit to f...

Design Repositories: Next-Generation Engineering Design Databases

Supporting Novice Engineers in Idea Generation using Design Heuristics

How can beginning engineers learn to generate a variety of candidate concepts to consider? Because they likely have little experience with idea generation, training in specific techniques may be especially useful. Design Heuristics are an evidence-based tool developed to help engineers expand diversity of ideas considered during the front-end phase of design. Brainstorming is a common ideation ...