A Case-Study Analysis of Design Heuristics in an Upper-Level Cross-Disciplinary Design Course

This work reports on a case study in which we followed the design processes of eight student design teams enrolled in a semester-long upper-level design course involving a new ideation tool, “Design Heuristics.” We observed how students formulated concepts and implemented ideas using the Design Heuristics tool in their ongoing projects. Our analysis revealed that all teams carried their heuristic-inspired concepts to their latter stage designs, with seven teams carrying their heuristic-inspired concepts to their final designs and prototypes. As all eight teams studied were working on different design problems, our findings demonstrate the utility and practicality of Design Heuristics across various design contexts. In addition, we found patterns in the design teams’ general approaches to the design process, including synthesis, transformation, and abstraction. Seven of the eight teams showed some evidence of concept synthesis in their design processes, but often struggled in synthesizing multiple concepts together. Additionally, all teams seemed to directly transfer their ideas, concepts, or prototypes from one phase of the design process to another without abstraction (the use of a heuristic in an unanticipated way as a prompt to think of something new), while only three teams showed evidence of abstract transformation to develop their ideas across design process phases (such as from an early design phase to a later one). Our findings provide pedagogical recommendations for using the Design Heuristics tool in design classes and suggest opportunities for further research related to concept generation, development, and synthesis throughout the design process. Introduction Successful concept generation has been identified as the source of successful innovations, but engineering students often struggle to generate multiple and diverse ideas to fully explore the solution space. This challenge is due, in part, to a lack of instruction on systematic approaches to idea generation and innovative thinking. Instructors might encourage students to “brainstorm” to generate ideas, but may not know or provide their students with specific instructions about how to do so. This lack of formal idea generation instruction leaves students to their own devices, and therefore, novice designers often fail to employ specific design strategies as they initiate and develop concept ideas. Existing research has uncovered two specific cognitive challenges associated with concept generation in engineering: (1) engineers form an early attachment to their initial ideas and stop considering alternatives; and (2) engineers are unable to break away from known examples or solutions. Ullman et al. found that engineers tended not to explore multiple ideas and instead only pursued a single proposed design they quickly settled upon. Ball et al. found that engineers tended to adhere to their original idea, even if this solution had serious flaws. The first cognitive difficulty, as identified above, has been termed “fixation,” because the designer fixates on and persistently pursues an initial idea instead of spending time and effort searching for a better alternative. The second cognitive difficulty is also a form of fixation – fixation on an existing example – and was highlighted in Jansson and Smith’s work where designers were shown an existing example of an unsatisfactory product and were made aware of its flaws. When they were asked to design an alternative solution, the designers frequently included elements of the provided example, along with the example’s flaws. Therefore, these designers performed more P ge 2.23.2 poorly than the control group of designers who had not seen the initial example. This research shows that, without an intervention, designers are often blocked by their own initial ideas as well as any other existing ideas related to the design task. As a result, designers tend to stop short of generating a diverse set of novel concepts. Several methods for concept generation have been published and used in design courses; however, only one has been systematically derived from engineering design and designers’ processes and empirically validated in scientific studies—Design Heuristics. Design Heuristics were developed through analyses of innovative product designs and protocol studies with expert industrial designers and engineers. Additional studies verified their success in guiding solution space exploration by both student and expert engineers, and industrial designers. The 77 distinct Design Heuristics are packaged as easy-to-use prompts to guide the generation of new concepts. Each Design Heuristic can be used in multiple ways to initiate a new concept or to transform an existing concept. Design Heuristics provide specific strategies that can produce multiple, diverse, and creative concepts for any type of product design problem. While Design Heuristics have been rigorously derived from and validated for individual ideation, their impact on student teams throughout a design process has not been researched. This paper presents a study of how eight student teams in an upper-level design course applied Design Heuristics throughout their design processes. We examine the relationship between Design Heuristics use in early design phases to student design team outcomes, and the applicability of Design Heuristics across different problem contexts. Our analysis also searched for patterns in the design teams’ general approaches to the design process, including patterns of synthesis, transformation, and abstraction, and how these approaches affected concept development. Design Heuristics Design Heuristics are strategies to encourage a wide exploration of a variety of ideas during the ideation phase. In psychology, a cognitive heuristic is a “rule of thumb” used to make a decision or judgment. Cognitive heuristics do not necessarily lead to definite or explicit solutions; instead, they describe specific methods to make “best guesses” at potential solutions. Psychological research has shown that the efficient use of domain-specific heuristics distinguishes experts from novices; experts use cognitive heuristics constantly and effectively, while novices do not. Applying the idea of cognitive heuristics within the domain of product design, research with designers and engineers resulted in a specific set of 77 “rules of thumb” for design, called Design Heuristics. The Design Heuristics have been empirically demonstrated as effective in helping designers generate possible conceptual solutions to address their design problems. Design Heuristics can be applied multiple times during ideation and in various combinations to produce a wide range of novel concepts. They guide designers and engineers to generate non-obvious, distinct ideas, therefore producing a larger set of diverse ideas from which to choose. A complete list of the empirically-derived Design Heuristics is shown in Figure 1 below.