Assessment of Relatedness to a given Solution in 3d Fabrication and Prototyping Education

This study outlines initial steps to define a new framework to measure relatedness, originality and creativity of student projects in FabLab environment. A default project topic provided to students in a 3D fabrication and prototyping class served as a basis to investigate originality on the functional component level. The added components with their input and output methods, along with the control logic, were used to judge the relatedness to a given solution of the generated design ideas. An example set of ideas given by the students was evaluated with the proposed framework. The framework can complement existing measures of originality and creativity in general.