This study is aimed at ways to assess and improve design students’ creative outcomes and assist educators in crafting design briefs for the design studios. The procedure entails a controlled yet analytical experiment in a university setting intended to test the potential of using analogical thinking in order to enhance the Novelty and Usefulness of design solutions. The control group received a brief characterized by the availability of typical examples without instructions to use analogies. A second group was provided with a brief including verbal analogies triggered by text representations in the form of word pairs. The last group received the same visual stimuli as the first and second groups and instructions to identify negative statements before using analogies between those images and a list of words. One hundred and seven first-year undergraduate students took part in the study. The results demonstrated that design briefs with specific instructions to use textual-based analogies contributed to highly novel outcomes. However, when analogies were triggered by statements concerning negative issues of the design problem, students were able to produce more useful outcomes. We thus suggest that textual-based analogies can be employed as a good in-class pedagogical tool for improving novice designers' creative outcomes overall.

The Use of Analogies and the Design Brief Information: Impact on Creative Outcomes

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2021/volume/85369

ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2021)

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