Seda McKilligan

Iowa State University | ISU · Industrial Design

Designers' engagement in ideation is impacted by their perceptions of the parameters of the design task. Whereas expert designers actively interrogate and reframe given problems, novice designers tend to solve them as given. We investigated novice designers' perceptions of their ideas relative to problem frames and their cognitive styles. We found...

Design cognition' refers to the mental processes and representations involved in designing, and has been a significant area of interest since the emergence of design research in the 1960s. The field now faces significant challenges moving into the future, with major change required to overcome stagnation in research topics and methodologies. Tackli...

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...

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...

Design Thinking has become increasingly popular across different disciplines. However, what it exactly entails is becoming more and more vague, leading to the term being used for many different approaches and applications. This paper presents an interview study with experts on the application and training of Design Thinking in academia and industry...

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...

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...

Many tools, techniques, and other interventions have been developed to support idea generation within the design process. In previous research, we explored the separate effects of three such design interventions: teaming, problem framing, and design heuristics. In the teaming intervention, participants discussed a design prompt together but recorde...

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...

Designers used to solving problems that are given to them leading them to focus on creating feasible solutions rather than exploring novel perspectives on the presented problems. Creative innovations in problem understanding may lead directly to more innovation solutions. Although problem exploration has been identified as a key process in design t...

Various interventions (i.e., methods and tools that guide design work) have been developed to support successful idea generation in a design process. Our previous research explored the impacts of three such design interventions: cognitive-style based teaming, problem framing, and design heuristics. In this work, we looked across these interventions...

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...

Dr. McKilligan's research focuses on approaches in the design innovation process, ideation flexibility, investigations of problem-solution spaces, and concept generation and development practices of novices through practitioners. She produces theory, design principles and systems to support design, engineering and educational innovation processes,...

Understanding the strategies instructional designers use in practice can help to identify the factors that influence how courses and learning environments are designed and suggest methods to improve practices. Prior research has shown that educators use heuristics, models, and frameworks 1–5, as they design their courses. Although prior work has co...

Human-computer interaction (HCI) has been challenged in recent years because of advanced technology requiring adoption of new applications and investigations of connection with other disciplines, to enhance its theoretical knowledge. Design thinking (DT), an innovative and creative problem solving process, provides potential answers to the kind of...

Creativity and diversity are key components of success in idea generation, but each includes many dimensions. Paradigm-relatedness is an indicator of the style of creativity and diversity that has been overlooked often in assessing ideation. The goals for this study were to synthesize the literature on paradigm-relatedness, and develop and test alt...

The concept of design thinking has received increasing attention during recent years, particularly from managers around the world. However, despite being the subject of a vast number of articles and books stating its importance, the effectiveness of this approach is unclear, as the claims about the concept are not grounded on empirical studies or e...

Ideation flexibility is the ability to shift between a designer’s preferred and non-preferred ways of generating solutions as required by the presented task. There are many tools that exist to support ideation; however, there is a lack of research defining how to facilitate ideation flexibility and how to support designers in this process through u...

Today’s engineers’ needs are evolving rapidly as the information and technologies that compete for their attentions. At the same time, our institutions and systems are stretched to their limits to keep up with the changing demands of the times. There is, especially, a need to sustain reflective integration of social and technical knowledge into the...

This paper introduces the Idea Mapping Board, a visualization tool that supports the formation of shared mental models within design teams during concept generation and assessment. The Idea Mapping Board is intended for small teams of two to four practicing engineers or engineering students. It incorporates multiple dimensions for concept assessmen...

This paper focuses on comparing and contrasting methods for assessing the variety of a group of design ideas. Variety is an important attribute of design ideas, because it indicates the extent to which the solution space has been explored. There is a greater likelihood of successfully solving a design problem when a more diverse set of ideas is gen...

Assessment of elaboration in concept generation is critical, as it functions as a communication tool for the designer to iterate on solutions and to convey the generated ideas to other stakeholders involved in the early stages of the design process. Further, design educators may offer feedback to students about the elaborateness of their sketches,...

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...

Considering a wide range of ideas is crucial for engineers as they seek to solve complex problems. Paradigm-relatedness is one dimension on which ideas can range from more incremental—ideas that refine and improve existing solutions—to more radical—ideas that approach a problem from a new perspective or seemingly unrelated angle. We developed a too...

The project uses a cross-functional, collaborative instructional model for course design and professional formation, called X-teams. X-teams are reshaping the core technical ECE curricula in the sophomore and junior years through pedagogical approaches that (a) promote design thinking, systems thinking, professional skills such as leadership, and i...

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...

In an engineering context, ideation flexibility is defined as an engineer’s ability to move between his or her preferred and non-preferred ways of generating ideas as required by the current task. In this study, the usability of three specific tools for enhancing the ideation flexibility of engineers—the Problem Framing Guide, Design Heuristics and...

Design problems evolve throughout many typical design processes. Little research has focused on the extent to which design problems evolve and the role that various factors play in this evolution. In this research, we drew from data gathered for the Design Thinking Research Symposium that traced a design team's process as they progressed from the e...

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...

The goal of this study was to explore multiple quantitative measures of design ideation shifts. We specifically investigated shifts in ideation focused on generating incremental design solutions versus radical design solutions. Utilizing Kirton’s Adaption-Innovation (A-I) theory, incremental solutions were labeled as being more adaptive and radical...

The goal of this study was to explore multiple quantitative measures of design ideation shifts. We specifically investigated shifts in ideation focused on generating incremental design solutions versus radical design solutions. Utilizing Kirton’s Adaption-Innovation (A-I) theory, incremental solutions were labeled as being more adaptive and radical...

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...

focuses on strategies for design innovations through divergent and convergent thinking as well as through deep needs and community assessments using design ethnography, and translating those strategies to design tools and education. She teaches design and en-trepreneurship courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, focusing on front-end desi...

Design feedback is an essential pedagogical tool to promote student design progress, yet little research has focused on what instructor feedback looks like, especially across design disciplines. In this paper, we analyzed feedback provided in dance choreography, industrial design, and mechanical engineering to explore variation in feedback type acr...

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...

This paper examines ideation variety as a measure of the extent to which a design solution space has been explored. We investigated one cognitive factor (cognitive style) and one cognitive intervention (Design Heuristics cards) and their relationships with students' ideation variety, both actual and perceived. Cognitive style was measured using the...

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...

*Awarded Best Paper in the Design Engineering Education Division, 2015* Ideation is a key component of the design process, which often takes place in team settings. The team approach to design requires the involvement of all parties demonstrating the use of their expertise and knowledge in the area. Teaming has been shown to have both positive and...

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...

The role of ideation in design is to generate design solutions that have the potential for further development. Having many diverse ideas increases the potential for successful design outcomes by increasing the number of possibilities available during concept evaluation and selection phases. How do we define the problems that would allow for the mo...

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...

Engineering and design students are often required to evaluate their products against user requirements, but frequently, these requirements are abstracted from the user or context of use rather than coming from actual user and context data. Abstraction of user requirements makes it difficult for students to empathize with the eventual user of the p...

The way design problems are presented may influence an engineer's ideation process, and eventually, the design outcomes. We aimed to explore the ways in which pre-engineering students shift their design ideas based on different framings of design problems. We evaluated ideas with respect to the metric of paradigm-relatedness, which refers to the ex...

Design teaching in many disciplines relies on feedback as a primary way for students and instructors to communicate. Our work focused on identifying feedback types in three different design disciplines (dance choreography, industrial design, and mechanical engineering) and analyzing how those feedback types encouraged students to take convergent or...

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 analysi...

Mathematics (STEM) fields. The central aspect of his work has been trying to understand the bidirectional impacts that occur when students attempt to coordinate ideas and practices from the more basic disciplines of Science and Mathematics with related ideas and practices from the more applied disciplines of Technology and Engineering. This focus i...

A recent National Academy of Engineering report stated, “To capitalize on opportunities created by scientific discoveries, the nation must have engineers who can invent new products and services, create new industries and jobs, and generate new wealth”1. With increased international competition, economic uncertainty, and environmental resource limi...

Ideation is a critical skill for all engineers as they explore problem spaces and develop both short-term and long-term solutions. Engineers can benefit from developing proficiency in a diversity of ideation approaches in order to successfully perform in a variety of problem situations. However, the current engineering education paradigm lacks oppo...

Expert engineers are fluent at proposing many conceptual ideas early on in their process for solving a design problem. Beginning engineers are more likely to fixate on one or only a few ideas. Interventions aimed at this stage of the design process could help make it easier for beginning engineers to generate ideas that go beyond their initial ones...