Evaluating the Impacts of Different Interventions on Quality in Concept Generation

Producing ideas of high quality has great importance in engineering design. Although concept generation is sometimes one of the shorter phases of a project, concept generation that leads to viable and unique solutions can greatly contribute to a product’s final outcomes. Concept generation also has importance as a tool for engineering education and academic research. Because the quality of solutions can vary from individual to individual and from circumstance to circumstance, it would be useful to better understand how different interventions influence the outcomes of the ideation process in the concept generation stage of engineering design. In this work, we investigated the impacts of the problem context and three specific interventions designed to increase the ideation flexibility for the outcomes of concept generation. The three interventions were problem framing, design tools, and teaming. Our results show that both problem framing and teaming impact several aspects of quality, while design tools only impact the quantity of ideas produced.