Colleen M. Seifert

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Psychology

Engineering designers often generate multiple concepts to increase novelty and diversity among early solution candidates. Many past studies have focused on creating new concepts “from scratch;” however, designers at every level become fixated on their initial designs and struggle to generate different ideas. In line with prior work on design transf...

When reasoning about science studies, people often make causal theory errors by inferring or accepting a causal claim based on correlational evidence. While humans naturally think in terms of causal relationships, reasoning about science findings requires understanding how evidence supports—or fails to support—a causal claim. This study investigate...

Objectives In acute care settings, interactions between providers and tools drive clinical decision-making. Most studies of decision-making focus on individual cognition and fail to capture critical collaborations. Distributed Cognition (DCog) theory provides a framework for examining the dispersal of tasks among agents and artifacts, enhancing the...

Intolerance of uncertainty has been implicated in the development and maintenance of depression and anxiety (McEvoy & Mahoney, 2012). Given that, the lesson of improvisational theater training to embrace uncertainty (Napier, 2004) may explain its link to several psychological benefits such as reductions in anxiety and depression (Krueger, Murphy, &...

In conventional software development, user experience (UX) designers and engineers collaborate through separation of concerns (SoC): designers create human interface specifications, and engineers build to those specifications. However, we argue that Human-AI systems thwart SoC because human needs must shape the design of the AI interface, the under...

When prototyping AI experiences (AIX), interface designers seek effective ways to support end-user tasks through AI capabilities. However, AI poses challenges to design due to its dynamic behavior in response to training data, end-user data, and feedback. Designers must consider AI's uncertainties and offer adaptations such as explainability, error...

Ideation methods and outcomes have been evaluated in a variety of ways. Our study extends existing work through a qualitative analysis of idea characteristics based on the ideation method used. Beginning engineering students completed two short ideation sessions with a single design problem while following Individual Brainstorming and then Design H...

Introduction Diagnostic processes in the emergency department (ED) involve multiple interactions among individuals who interface with information systems to access and record information. A better understanding of diagnostic processes is needed to mitigate errors. This paper describes a study protocol to map diagnostic processes in the ED as a foun...

What makes a flagship species effective in engaging conservation donors? Large, charismatic mammals are typically selected as ambassadors, but a few studies suggest butterflies—and monarchs in particular—may be even more appealing. To gather more information about people’s responses to monarchs, we conducted an empirical study of member submissions...

Thinking of technology as a design material is appealing. It encourages designers to explore the material's properties to understand its capabilities and limitations, a prerequisite to generative design thinking. However, as a material, AI resists this approach because its properties emerge as part of the design process itself. Therefore, designers...

Engineering design processes are often defined as beginning with a problem and diverging to generate possible solutions; however, design processes can start with a newly developed technological solution, followed by a divergent search for potential problem applications it can solve, termed ‘solution mapping'. Building on previous research where eng...

When prototyping AI experiences (AIX), interface designers seek useful and usable ways to support end-user tasks through AI capabilities. However, AI poses challenges to design due to its dynamic behavior in response to training data, end-user data, and feedback. Designers must consider AI's uncertainties and offer adaptations such as explainabilit...

What makes a flagship species effective in engaging conservation donors? Large, charismatic mammals are typically selected as ambassadors, but a few studies suggest butterflies – and monarchs in particular – may be even more appealing. To gather more information about people’s responses to monarchs, we conducted an empirical study of member submiss...

Design processes sometimes begin with solutions rather than problems, particularly when new technologies spur searches for new problems to solve. Previous research on business entrepreneurship describes solution–first processes as a form of “opportunity recognition,” and proposes some strategies for finding technology “match” opportunities. However...

This paper reports an empirical evaluation of a new serious game created to foster learning about collaborative management of common pool resources. Stakeholders (n = 41) involved in the implementation of California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act were recruited to play a new serious game designed to illustrate how alternative water manage...

Background Training in improvisational theater is a widely available, popular and entertaining activity. It also is linked to a variety of psychological benefits, such as reductions in anxiety and depression in adult psychiatric patients (Krueger et al., 2017) and in social anxiety among adolescent public-school students (Felsman et al., 2019). How...

Jansson and Smith (1991) demonstrated design ‘fixation’ when an example solution is provided with a design problem. As a result of seeing an example -- even with its flaws pointed out -- new designs often share features with it. In Jansson and Smith's studies, a control group received no example and showed less fixation in comparison; however, this...

Learning from text is a constructive activity in which sentence-level information is combined by the reader to build coherent mental models. With increasingly complex texts, forming a mental model becomes challenging due to a lack of background knowledge, and limits in working memory and attention. To address this, we are taught knowledge externali...

Design processes can be influenced by their practice environments. Although design processes of industry engineers have been examined in multiple research studies, few studies have investigated design processes of academic engineers. As academia and industry have different sociocultural norms and constraints, their design processes likely also diff...

Engineering designers frequently use prototypes to gather input from stakeholders. Design guidelines recommend the use of quick and simple prototypes early and often in a design process. However, the type and quality of a prototype can influence how stakeholders perceive a new design concept and can, therefore, impact their responses. Additionally,...

Idea development in the early phases of the design process often involves the transformation of initial concepts into more feasible alternatives. However, this important component of design activity is often under-emphasized in design education, and tools to facilitate iteration of designs are limited. This study investigated Design Heuristics as a...

Background Problem exploration includes identifying, framing, and defining design problems and bounding problem spaces. Intentional and unintentional changes in problem understanding naturally occur as designers explore design problems to create solutions. Through problem exploration, new perspectives on the problem can emerge along with new and di...

Contribution: This paper examines ideation practices of biomedical engineering (BME) students in a capstone design course during a designated team ideation session and provides recommendations for structuring idea generation instruction. Background: Capstone courses provide students with opportunities to engage with open-ended and complex engineeri...

An innovative idea generation process explores a variety of diverse design ideas. While challenging to achieve even for expert designers, support tools can assist designers as they learn to generate more ideas, and more varied ideas, throughout their idea generation process. In this chapter, we summarize evidence identifying Design Heuristics in pr...

Numerous studies have shown the value of introducing cognitive supports to encourage the development of creative ability, and researchers have developed a variety of methods to aid in generating ideas. However, design students often struggle to explore more ideas after their initial ideas are exhausted. In this study, an empirically validated tool...

Adolescents who have Social Anxiety Disorder do not receive the support they need. Improvisational theater involves regular exposure to social performance situations, and is recognized as a potential psycho-social support to enhance well-being and symptom reduction. The current study examines whether participating in a school-based improvisational...

Design problems are often presented as structured briefs with detailed constraints and requirements, suggesting a fixed definition. However, past studies have identified the importance of exploring design problems for creative design outcomes. Previous protocol studies of designers has shown that problems can “co-evolve” with the development of sol...

With increasing demand for improved medical equipment and healthcare, next-generation biomedical engineers need strong design skills. Equipping biomedical engineering students with tools for idea generation and development can increase student design success. Design Heuristics are an ideation tool developed through empirical studies of product desi...

Designers are accustomed to solving problems that are provided to them; in fact, common practice in engineering is to present the problem with carefully delineated and detailed constraints required for a promising solution. As a consequence, engineers focus on creating feasible solutions rather than exploring novel perspectives on the presented pro...

Front-end design processes including problem definition and idea generation set a course for the ultimate success of a design. Many design process models emphasize the importance of divergence-considering alternative options-in promoting creativity. Depending on the circumstances of the design environment, design strategies to support divergence ma...

Microfluidics has been an important method in providing answers to a wide variety of research questions in chemistry, biochemistry, and biology. Microfluidic designers benefit from instructional textbooks describing foundational principles and practices in developing microfluidic devices; however, these texts do not offer guidance about how to gene...

Research in design has led to emergence of instructional tools to support students in generating multiple candidate concepts. Design Heuristics was developed through empirical studies of professional engineers and award-winning products, and have been shown to support student engineers in generating creative and diverse concepts. We hypothesized th...

How can beginning engineers learn to generate a variety of candidate concepts to consider? Because they likely have little experience with idea generation, training in specific techniques may be especially useful. Design Heuristics are an evidence-based tool developed to help engineers expand diversity of ideas considered during the front-end phase...

Engineers are accustomed to solving presented problems; in fact, common practice is to present the problem with carefully delineated and detailed constraints required in an acceptable solution. As a consequence, engineers focus on creating innovative, yet feasible solutions. However, for the Engineer of 2020, a critical shift in design practices is...

Learning about the “creative process” helps students as they undertake creative activities within a discipline. Instruction about how to create may involve a variety of pedagogical approaches across disciplines. Our study documents how college students learn about creativ¬e process through a study of their reported course experiences. We surveyed o...

While there is great interest in higher education about teaching creative process, there have been relatively few studies of how courses can facilitate the development of creative skills. The goal of this study was to document how college instructors structure courses intended to develop students’ creative processes. The study data included intervi...

This paper explores " problem exploration heuristics, " or cognitive strategies used to identify and reframe design problem descriptions. The way a design problem is structured influences the types of ideas a designer generates; in particular, some framings may lead to more creative solutions and using multiple framings can support diverse solution...

Concept generation techniques can help to support designers in generating multiple ideas during design tasks. However, differences in the ways these techniques guide idea generation are not well understood. This study investigated the qualities of concepts generated by beginning engineering designers using one of three different idea generation tec...

How do product designers create multiple concepts to consider? To address this question, we combine evidence from four empirical studies of design process and outcomes, including award-winning products, multiple concepts for a project by an experienced industrial designer, and concept sets from 48 industrial and engineering designers for a single d...

When engaged in design activity, what does a designer think about? And how does she draw on disciplinary knowledge, precedent, and other strategies in her design process in order to imagine new possible futures? In this paper, we explore Design Heuristics as a form of intermediate-level knowledge that may explain how designers build on existing kno...

Keelin Leahy is a lecturer of Technology Education at the University of Limerick. Keelin received her PhD from the University of Limerick in 2009, which focused on Design approaches in second level education. Keelin's main research interests include approaches for the development of creativity and design based activities and pedagogy in second leve...

Current design theory lacks a systematic method to identify what designers know that helps them to create innovative products. In the early stages of idea generation, designers may find novel ideas come readily to mind, or may become fixated on their own or existing products. This may limit the ability to consider more and more varied candidate con...

Research supports the central role cognitive strategies can play in successful concept generation by individual designers. Design heuristics have been shown to facilitate the creation of new design concepts in the early, conceptual stage of the design process, as well as throughout the development of ideas. However, we know relatively little about...

When facing a design problem, designers across disciplines often fall into familiar patterns, and have difficulty producing creative designs. This chapter presents a new tool to help with idea generation called Design Heuristics. These heuristics capture the cognitive "shortcuts" that designers know to help them produce many candidate designs with...

This paper presents an analysis of engineering students’ use of Design Heuristics as part of a team project in an undergraduate engineering design course. Design Heuristics are an empirically derived set of cognitive “rules of thumb” for use in concept generation. We investigated heuristic use in the initial concept generation phase, whether heuris...

We report four cases from a larger study, focusing on participants' self-identified " most creative " concept in relation to their other concepts. As part of an ideation session, first-year engineering students were asked to create concepts for one of two engineering design problems in an 85-minute period, and were exposed to one of two different f...

How far can teaching methods go to enhance learning? Optimal methods of teaching have been considered in research on supervised and unsupervised learning. Locally optimal methods are usually hybrids of teaching and self-directed approaches. The costs and benefits of specific methods have been shown to depend on the structure of the learning task, t...

This study explored how guided ideation can support concept initiation and development. We conducted a set of in-class activities in a junior-level industrial design studio at a large Midwestern US university with 20 students. Participants generated concepts individually while working on a previously defined problem. They performed a functional dec...

Creative thinking during concept generation has been identified as a key source of successful innovations; thus, techniques to support creative conceptual design are imperative in engineering education. However, teaching students to “think innovatively” has been difficult because educators lack effective instructional methods. While there are a var...

Idea generation has frequently been explored in design education as an exercise of students' " innate " creativity, and few tools or techniques are offered to scaffold ideation ability. As students develop their design skills, we expect them to demonstrate increasing ideation flexibility—a cognitive and social ability to see a problem from multiple...