Scarlett R. Miller

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · School of Engineering Design, Technology, and Professional Programs

Interacting with example products is an essential and widely practiced method in engineering design, yet little information exists on how the representation (pictorial or physical) or interaction a designer has with an example impacts design creativity. This is problematic because without this knowledge we do not understand how examples affect idea...

Although design novelty is a critical area of research in engineering design, most research in this space has focused on understanding and developing formal idea generation methods instead of focusing on the impact of current design practices. This is problematic because formal techniques are often not adopted in industry due to the burdensome step...

Expanding and improving design knowledge is a vital part of higher education due to the growing demand for employees who can think both critically and creatively. However, developing effective methods for assessing what students have learned in design courses is one of the most elusive challenges of design education due to the subjective nature of...

Although the additive manufacturing (AM) market continues to grow, industries face barriers to AM adoptiondue to a shortage of skilled designers in the workforce that can apply AM effectively to meet this demand. Thisshortage is attributed to the high cost and infrastructural requirements of introducing high- barrier-to-entry AMprocesses such as po...

Psychological safety has been shown to be a key facet for the development of innovative ideas, and has also been shown to be a cornerstone of effective teamwork. But how does the gender diversity of a team impact the development of psychological safety? The current study was developed to explore this through an empirical study with 38 engineering d...

This paper investigates team psychological safety (N = 34 teams) in a synchronous online engineering design class spanning 4 weeks. While work in this field has suggested that psychological safety in virtual teams can facilitate knowledge-sharing, trust among teams, and overall performance, there have been limited investigations of the longitudinal...

Introduction: Performance assessment and feedback are critical factors in successful medical simulation-based training. The Dynamic Haptic Robotic Trainer (DHRT) allows residents to practice ultrasound-guided needle insertions during simulated central venous catheterization (CVC) procedures while providing detailed feedback and assessment. A study...

Improving team interactions in engineering to model gender inclusivity has been at the forefront of many initiatives in both academia and industry. However, there has been limited evidence on the impact of gender-diverse teams on psychological safety. This is important because psychological safety has been shown to be a key facet for the developmen...

Research on psychological safety has been growing in recent years due to its role in promoting creativity and innovation, among other items. This is because teams with high levels of psychological safety feel safe to express ideas and opinions. While we are becoming more aware of the importance of psychological safety in teaming, there is limited e...

The demand for additive manufacturing (AM) continues to grow as more industries look to integrate the technology into their product development. However, there is a deficit of designers skilled to innovate with this technology due to challenges in supporting designers with tools and education for their development in design for AM (DfAM). There is...

There is growing evidence on the importance of psychological safety, or how comfortable participants feel in sharing their opinions and ideas in a team, in engineering team performance. However, how to support it in engineering student teams has yet to be explored. The goal of this study was to investigate whether a video intervention with assigned...

Psychological safety and turn-taking have both been listed as key factors needed for collaboration in teams to emerge. Specifically, prior work has shown that increased communication in teams can lead to high psychological safety. Prior work on turn-taking as a measure of communication has mostly focused on its inclusivity in a team rather than its...

Researchers and practitioners alike agree that for companies to survive and thrive they must develop and support radical innovation. However, these ideas are complex and risky, and not all succeed. Because of this, decision makers are often left to make hard decisions in terms of which ideas move on and which are abandoned. The goal of this paper w...

Instructional design is the theory surrounding how learners perceive information and is prevalent in simulation-based medical education. Simulation is used for a variety of medical procedures including central venous catheterization (CVC). The dynamic haptic robotic trainer (DHRT) is a CVC teaching simulator developed to specifically focus on train...

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a qualitative and quantitative approach to measuring and analyzing risk that compiles and ranks failure modes, their effects, and their corrective actions. Though widely used, traditional FMEA has been criticized for the lack of a scientific basis behind the Risk Priority Number calculation. To combat th...

Over the last several decades we have seen a shift from in-person to online training that has been exasperated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers believe that many of these effects will be lasting which makes it even more important that the Human Factors community seek to step back and understand how to best train complex skills in a virtual wor...

While psychological safety has been shown to be a consistent, generalizable, and multilevel predictor of outcomes in team performance across fields that can positively impact the creative process, there has been limited investigations of psychological safety in the engineering domain. Without this knowledge we do not know if or when fostering psych...

As additive manufacturing (AM) processes become ubiquitous in engineering and design, there has emerged the need for a workforce skilled in designing for AM (DfAM). Researchers have proposed educational interventions to train students in DfAM; however, few measures with sufficient validity evidence have been proposed to assess the effects of these...

Research on malevolent creativity has rarely linked the generation of harmful ideas with their implementation (i.e., malevolent innovation). To explain why people might act upon their malevolently creative ideas, we drew on affective events theory. Specifically, given evidence that aggressive and creative thought events can elicit positive emotions...

While psychological safety has been shown to be a consistent, generalizable, and multilevel predictor of outcomes in team performance across fields that can positively impact the creative process, there have been limited investigations of psychological safety in the engineering domain. Without this knowledge, we do not know whether fostering psycho...

Additive manufacturing (AM) presents designers with unique manufacturing capabilities while imposing several limitations. Designers must leverage AM capabilities – through opportunistic design for AM (O-DfAM) – and accommodate AM limitations – through restrictive (R-) DfAM – to successfully employ AM in engineering design. This dual DfAM approach –...

A Computer Vision enabled Smart Tray (CVST) was designed for use in medical training for Central Venous Catheterization (CVC). The effects of background color on the ability of the computer vision algorithm to distinguish between tools and the tray was investigated. In addition, the computer vision algorithm was evaluated for accuracy in tool detec...

The global pandemic of 2020 caused a paradigm shift in engineering education. In a matter of weeks, and sometimes days, faculty members across the world had to move their hands-on engineering courses to an online environment. During this shift, educators relied on technology more so than ever to improve student design learning without an empiricall...

Empathy is known to help engineering designers develop a deeper understanding of the users’ needs. However, prior research on individuals has identified that individual differences, such as personality traits and risk-taking attributes, could significantly impact designer’s empathy. While this prior research provides a context for why individual di...

The ability to understand and feel the needs and circumstances of others, also known as empathy, has been found to help engineering designers develop a deeper understanding of the design problems they solve. While prior work has examined the utility of empathic design experiences on driving creative concept generation, little is known about the rol...

Background This study compares surgical residents’ knowledge acquisition of ultrasound-guided Internal Jugular Central Venous Catheterization (US-IJCVC) between in-person and online procedural training cohorts before receiving independent in-person Dynamic Haptic Robotic Simulation training. Methods Three surgical residency procedural training coh...

A picture is worth a thousand words, and in design metric estimation, a word may be worth a thousand features. Pictures are awarded this worth because they encode a plethora of information. When evaluating designs, we aim to capture a range of information, including usefulness, uniqueness, and novelty of a design. The subjective nature of these con...

Interest is growing in the dark side of creativity and recent research has been instrumental in improving our understanding of the phenomenon. However, such efforts have also revealed confusion regarding the definition and operationalization of the dark side of creativity and malevolent creativity in particular. In response, we offer definitional c...

Over the past decade, engineering design research has seen a significant surge of the discussion of empathy. As such, design researchers have been devoted in devising and assessing empathic design activities. While prior research has examined the utility of empathic design experiences on driving creative concept generation, little is known about th...

There has been a plethora of design theory and methodology research conducted to answer important questions centered around how ideas are developed and translated into successful products. Understanding this is vital because of the role creativity and innovation have in long-term economic success. However, most of this research have focused on U.S....

Gamification, or adding elements of games to training systems, has the potential to increase learner engagement and information retention. However, the use of gamification has yet to be explored in Central Venous Catheterization (CVC) trainers which teach a commonly performed medical procedure with high incidence rates. In order to combat these err...

Given the growing presence of additive manufacturing (AM) processes in engineering design and manufacturing, there has emerged an increased interest in introducing AM and design for AM (DfAM) educational interventions in engineering education. Several researchers have proposed AM and DfAM educational interventions; however, some argue that these ef...

Additive manufacturing (AM) processes present designers with unique capabilities while imposing several process limitations. Designers must leverage the capabilities of AM — through opportunistic design for AM (DfAM) — and accommodate AM limitations — through restrictive DfAM — to successfully employ AM in engineering design. These opportunistic an...

Nearly 60 years ago, Thomas Kuhn revolutionized how we think of scientific discovery and innovation when he identified that scientific change can occur in incremental developments that improve upon existing solutions, or it can occur as drastic change in the form of a paradigm shift. In engineering design, both types of scientific change are critic...

While teaming is a vital component of engineering, it is important to remember that there is no team without individuals and individual behavior can drive team outputs. One of these individual factors that may manifest itself at the team level is individual risk-taking attitudes, which can be impacted by personality and preferences for creativity....

A picture is worth a thousand words, and in design metric estimation, a word may be worth a thousand features. Pictures are awarded this worth because of their ability to encode a plethora of information. When evaluating designs, we aim to capture a range of information as well, information including usefulness, uniqueness, and novelty of a design....

Although there is a substantial growth in the Additive Manufacturing (AM) market commensurate with the demand for products produced by AM methods, there is a shortage of skilled designers in the workforce that can apply AM effectively to meet this demand. This is due to the innate complications with cost and infrastructure for high-barrier-to-entry...

As additive manufacturing (AM) processes become more ubiquitous in engineering, design, and manufacturing, the need for a workforce skilled in design for AM (DfAM) has grown. Despite this need for an AM-skilled workforce, little research has systematically investigated the formulation of educational interventions for training engineers in DfAM. In...

Design variety metrics measure how much a design space is explored. This article proposes that a generalized class of entropy metrics based on Sharma–Mittal entropy offers advantages over existing methods to measure design variety. We show that an exemplar metric from Sharma–Mittal entropy, namely, the Herfindahl–Hirschman index for design (HHID) h...

Although needle insertion remains a crucial part of medicine practice, there still exists a gap between theoretical knowledge and real-world practice with live patients. To help bridge this gap, the Low-Cost Needle Insertion Simulator, or the LCNIS, is developed to assist students in gaining more confidence through simulated practice. It does so fi...

An advanced surface for Central Venous Catheterization (CVC) training and evaluation was designed using sensorization techniques, including the use of a hall effect sensor array to measure the insertion depth of a catheter. The sensor array was tested for accuracy in both static and dynamic scenarios, and was found to be sufficiently accurate; meas...

A concept for a sensorized medical tray in conjunction with real-time visual cues to aid medical residents in learning the steps of complicated tray-based medical procedures, such as central venous catheterization, was designed and tested as a first iteration. This paper outlines the selection of an LED screen to illuminate various medical devices...

The capabilities of additive manufacturing (AM) open up designers’ solution space and enable them to build designs previously impossible through traditional manufacturing. However, to leverage AM capabilities, design educators must specifically emphasize selecting creative ideas in design for AM (DfAM), as ideas perceived as infeasible through the...

To capitalize the design freedoms enabled by additive manufacturing (AM), designers must employ opportunistic and restrictive design for AM (O- and R-DfAM respectively). The order of information presentation influences the retrieval of said information; however, there is a need to explore this effect within DfAM. We compared four variations in DfAM...

The Dynamic Haptic Robotic Trainer (DHRT) was developed to minimize the up to 39% of adverse effects experienced by patients during Central Venous Catheterization (CVC) by standardizing CVC training, and provide automated assessments of performance. Specifically, this system was developed to replace manikin trainers that only simulate one patient a...

Designers skilled in design for additive manufacturing (AM, DfAM) must apply restrictive DfAM to prevent build failure and opportunistic DfAM to leverage AM capabilities. Few studies have explored the effect of students’ motivation on the outcomes of AM education. The experiment in this article introduced engineering students to either restrictive...

Design researchers have long sought to understand the mechanisms that support creative idea development. However, one of the key challenges faced by the design community is how to effectively measure the nebulous construct of creativity. The social science and engineering communities have adopted two vastly different approaches to solving this prob...

Having empathy in the design process can help engineers relate to the end user by identifying what and why certain experiences are meaningful. While there have been efforts to identify the factors that impact empathic tendencies in engineering, there has been limited evidence on how a students' trait empathy or empathic self-efficacy develops over...

Research on empathy has been surging in popularity in the engineering design community since empathy is known to help designers develop a deeper understanding of the users’ needs. Because of this, the design community has been invested in devising and assessing empathic design activities. However, research on empathy has been primarily limited to i...

Design researchers have long sought to understand the mechanisms that support creative idea development. However, one of the key challenges faced by the design community is how to effectively measure the nebulous construct of creativity. The social science and engineering communities have adopted two vastly different approaches to solving this prob...

High globalization in the world today results in the involvement of multi-discipline, multi-cultural teams, as well as the entrance of more economic powers in the market. Effective innovation strategies are critical if emerging markets plan to become economic players in this increasingly connected global market. The current work compares the design...

Advancing virtual education through technology is an important step for engineering education. This has been made evident by the educational difficulties associated with the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Maintaining educational standards while using virtual learning is something possibly solved through researching new educational technologies. A potentia...

Psychological safety has been shown to be a consistent, generalizable, and multilevel predictor of outcomes in performance and learning across fields. While work in this field has suggested that psychological safety can impact the creative process, particularly in the generation of ideas and in the discussions surrounding idea development, there ha...

Concept screening is one of the gatekeepers of innovation process and thus is considered a vital component of engineering design. Yet, we know very little about how decisions are made during concept screening or the factors that inform these decisions. This is due in part to the fact that most prior work on concept screening in engineering design h...

The capabilities of additive manufacturing (AM) open up designers’ solution space and enable them to build designs previously impossible through traditional manufacturing. To leverage AM, designers must not only generate creative ideas, but also propagate these ideas without discarding them in the early design stages. This emphasis on selecting cre...

The capabilities of additive manufacturing (AM) processes present designers with creative freedoms beyond the limitations of traditional manufacturing processes. However, to successfully leverage AM, designers must balance their creativity against the limitations inherent in these processes to ensure their designs can be feasibly manufactured. To e...

An Incremental Needle Insertion System (INIS) which simultaneously measures the force and position of a needle during insertion was designed and fabricated for use in a tissue deformation study to improve realism in medical simulation. The INIS was tested in a fresh frozen cadaver experiment and the position of the needle was plotted and compared t...

Additive Manufacturing (AM) offers unique capabilities, yet inherent limitations due to the layered fabrication of parts. Despite the newfound design freedom and increased use of AM, limited research has investigated how knowledge of the AM processes affects the creativity of students’ ideas. This study investigates this gap through a study with 34...

Additive manufacturing (AM) enables engineers to improve the functionality and performance of their designs by adding complexity at little to no additional cost. However, AM processes also exhibit certain unique limitations, such as the presence of support material. These limitations must be accounted for to ensure that designs can be manufactured...

The integration of additive manufacturing (AM) processes in many industries has led to the need for AM education and training, particularly on design for AM (DfAM). To meet this growing need, several academic institutions have implemented educational interventions, especially project- and problem-based, for AM education; however, limited research h...

Background: The objective of this study was to validate the transfer of ultrasound-guided Internal Jugular Central Venous Catheterization (US-IJCVC) placement skills from training on a Dynamic Haptic Robotic Trainer (DHRT), to placing US-IJCVCs in clinical environments. DHRT training greatly reduces preceptor time by providing automated feedback,...

Manikins have traditionally been used to train ultrasound-guided Central Venous Catheterization (CVC), but are static in nature and require an expert observer to provide feedback. As a result, virtual simulation and personalized learning has been increasingly adopted in medical education to efficiently provide quantitative feedback. The Dynamic Hap...

The integration of additive manufacturing (AM) processes in many industries has led to the need for AM education and training, particularly on design for AM (DfAM). To meet this growing need, several academic institutions have implemented educational interventions, especially project-and problem-based, for AM education; however, limited research ha...

Additive manufacturing (AM) enables engineers to improve the functionality and performance of their designs by adding complexity at little to no additional cost. However, AM processes also exhibit certain unique limitations, such as the presence of support material, which must be accounted for to ensure that designs can be manufactured feasibly and...

Product dissection has the ability to create an engaging and active learning environment for engineering students. The purpose of this paper was to further investigate students’ perceptions on product dissection in the classroom. This paper was developed to provide an examination of the usefulness of product dissection for idea generation and how p...

In this paper, we propose a new design variety metric based on the Herfindahl index. We also propose a practical procedure for comparing variety metrics via the construction of ground truth datasets from pairwise comparisons by experts. Using two new datasets, we show that this new variety measure aligns with human ratings more than some existing a...

Although teamwork is being integrated throughout engineering education because of the perceived benefits of teams, the construct of psychological safety has been largely ignored in engineering research. This omission is unfortunate, because psychological safety reflects collective perceptions about how comfortable team members feel in sharing their...

Product dissection, in either physical or virtual form, has been found to be an effective learning tool. With the rapid growth of technology, effective virtual education tools have the potential to continue increasing in value. Although physical product dissection is often implemented in the classroom, there are some limitations to employing these...

While we know that poor decisions during concept screening can lead to great expenses including redesign costs, production postponement, and even product failure, little is known about what factors influence professional concept screening. Previous research in this area has mostly been conducted with students or used hypothetical design challenges...

The use of additive manufacturing (AM) has increased in many industries, resulting in a commensurate need for a workforce skilled in AM. To meet this need, educational institutions are integrating design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) into the engineering curriculum. However, limited research has explored the impact of these educational interven...

Medical simulation training is widely used to effectively train for invasive medical procedures such peripheral nerve blocks. Traditionally, accurate haptic training relies on expensive cadavers, mannequins, or advanced haptic robots. Proposed herein is a novel concept for haptic training called the Low Cost Haptic Force Needle Insertion Simulator...

Product dissection is a popular educational tool in engineering design due to its ability to help students understand a product, provide inspiration for new design ideas, and aid in product redesign. While prior research has investigated how dissecting a product before idea generation impacts the creative output of the ideation session, these studi...

Ultrasound guidance is used for a variety of surgical needle insertion procedures, but there is currently no standard for the teaching of ultrasound skills. Recently, computer ultrasound simulation has been introduced as an alternative teaching method to traditional manikin and cadaver training because of its ability to provide diverse scenario tra...

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 purpo...

Building prototypes is an important part of the concept selection phase of the design process, where fuzzy ideas get represented to support communication and decision making. However, the previous studies have shown that prototypes generate different levels of user feedback based on their fidelity and esthetics. Furthermore, prior research on conce...

Creativity is universally acknowledged as an important attribute of successful engineering design, but individual attributes and preferences can influence whether creative ideas come to fruition during the design process. However, few studies have explored the factors that can predict creative concept generation and selection in engineering design...

Introduction: High-tech simulators are gaining popularity in surgical training programs because of their potential for improving clinical outcomes. However, most simulators are static in nature and only represent a single anatomical patient configuration. The Dynamic Haptic Robotic Training (DHRT) system was developed to simulate these diverse pat...

Ownership bias is a decision-making bias that leads to an individual's tendency to prefer their own ideas over others' during the design process. While prior work has identified the existence of this ownership bias in design professionals, limited work has investigated how the characteristics of the idea set affects this bias. In other words, is a...

Background: The objective of this study was to determine whether gaze patterns could differentiate expertise during simulated ultrasound-guided Internal Jugular Central Venous Catheterization (US-IJCVC) and if expert gazes were different between simulators of varying functional and structural fidelity. Methods: A 2017 study compared eye gaze pat...

Assessing similarity between design ideas is an inherent part of many design evaluations to measure novelty. In such evaluation tasks, humans excel at making mental connections among diverse knowledge sets to score ideas on their uniqueness. However, their decisions about novelty are often subjective and difficult to explain. In this paper, we demo...

The objective of this work is to explore the possible biases that individuals may have toward the perceived functionality of machine generated designs, compared to human created designs. Toward this end, 1187 participants were recruited via Amazon mechanical Turk (AMT) to analyze the perceived functional characteristics of both human created two-di...

Ownership bias is a type of decision making bias that leads to an individual's tendency to prefer their own ideas over the ideas of others during the design process. While prior work has identified the existence of this effect in design professionals, this prior research failed to take into account the social effects of working in a team environmen...

Up to 14 billion dollars are spent in the construction industry annually as a result of work-related injuries. The current study was developed in an effort to minimize the costs associated with these short-and long-term injuries through the use of wearable technologies and a two-phase study that included 13 semi-structured interviews and a usabilit...

Product dissection is a popular educational tool in engineering design due to its ability to help students understand the components and sub-components of a product, provide inspiration for new design ideas, and aid in product redesign. While prior research has investigated how dissecting a product before idea generation impacts the creative output...

Design fixation is often thought of only as a limiting factor when a designer is generating ideas, but design fixation is defined only as 'sometimes counter-productive' indicating that there may be room for good fixation. In addition, design fixation is defined as a 'blind adherence', meaning that the designer does not know that they are limiting t...