Expanding the Solution Space in Engineering Design Education: A Simulation-Based Investigation of Product Dissection

Abstract

Product dissection has been highlighted as an effective means of interacting with example products in order to produce creative outcomes. While product dissection is often conducted as a team in engineering design education, the research on the effectiveness of product dissection activities has been primarily limited to individuals. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the type(s) of product dissected in a team environment on encouraging creative design outcomes (variety, novelty, and quantity) and the underlying influence of educational level and dissection modality on these effects. This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 14,000 teams of noninteracting brainstorming individuals generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique using a design repository of 931 ideas generated by first-year and senior engineering students. The results of the study highlight the importance of educational level, dissection modality, and the number of products dissected on team design outcomes. Specifically, virtual dissection encouraged the exploration of more novel solutions across both educational levels. However, physical dissection encouraged the exploration of a larger variety and quantity of ideas for senior teams while virtual dissection encouraged the same in first-year teams. Finally, dissecting different types of products allowed teams to explore a larger solution space. The findings presented in this study can lead to a better understanding of how to deploy product dissection modules in engineering design education in order to drive creative design outcomes.

Flare-fork collaborative strategy: expanding design space via opportunistic ideation in engineering product design

“…A literature search revealed different methods by which researchers have envisaged a design support tool for designers. These include computational support that works like recommender system (Verhaegen et al, 2011), tools to support the exploration of problem space (Murray et al, 2019), solution space (Alzayed et al, 2019), idea generation strategies (Studer et al, 2018) and framework for engineering design instruction (Crismond & Adams, 2012).…”

“…Fostering students' ability to expand the problem and solution space can help them find design solutions that are more effective, mature, and of higher quality (Alzayed et al, 2019).…”

Computational Study on Design Space Expansion During Teamwork

“…As new design issues are created and introduced, the design space changes through expansion. Design space expansion has been linked to creativity (Dorst and Cross, 2001): researchers argued that a larger design space creates more opportunities for generating novel, useful and surprising, i.e., creative designs (Alsager Alzayed et al, 2019;Gero and Kan, 2016). Studies (e.g., Shah et al, 2000) have demonstrated that design space expansion leads to greater design variety and solutions of a higher quality and effectiveness.…”

“…Studies (e.g., Shah et al, 2000) have demonstrated that design space expansion leads to greater design variety and solutions of a higher quality and effectiveness. Therefore, it is not surprising that numerous works aimed at studying (Alsager Alzayed et al, 2019) and supporting design space expansion through the use of, for example, heuristics (Daly et al, 2012) or computational tools (Gero and Kumar, 1993;Han et al, 2018). Relatedly, several studies explored the rate at which the design space expands in a team setting (e.g., Gero and Kan, 2016;Martinec et al, 2020).…”

Empathic creativity: can trait empathy predict creative concept generation and selection?

“…Thus, future research is warranted to determine whether empathy has a role on the type of engineering professions they select. Finally, while prior research found that the ideation patterns of first year and senior-level students differ (Alsager Alzayed et al ., 2019), this work only studied first-year students. Thus, future research is warranted to extend those findings beyond first-year students.…”