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The Effects of Analogical and Metaphorical Reasoning on Design Thinking
Abstract
This research sought to examine whether analogical and metaphorical reasoning could be taught as a teaching strategy to enhance students’ creative thinking in the design process. To investigate the effects of analogical and metaphorical reasoning in design thinking, research was conducted with second year university students majoring in interior architecture. First, a pilot study was conducted to identify the effectiveness of analogical and metaphorical reasoning in supporting design thinking. Based on the results of the pilot study, a curriculum was developed and implemented in a studio course for one semester that encouraged students to engage in analogical and metaphorical reasoning. A further experiment was conducted to validate the effects of the curriculum on students’ design thinking processes. The overall results suggested that a teaching strategy that emphasises the use of analogical and metaphorical reasoning could enhance students’ design thinking and lead to more creative design processes.
... The importance of nurturing students' creative thinking in design education has been emphasized by many researchers and educators because creativity is a crucial part of architectural design. Critical design thinking can be a powerful way to motivate various design ideas by allowing an interactive understanding of an ill-defined design problem; thus, researchers have tried to find effective methods to stimulate students' creative thinking [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Design education has generally been delivered to students via teachers' subjective teaching methods rather than through a systematic academic approach [9]. ...
... Design education is related to the teaching methods that educate students to acquire relevant knowledge or skills. Students are generally educated to develop logical and convergent thinking for correct answers; therefore, they tend to adopt linear thinking even when solving ill-defined design problems in architectural design [2,6]. Most students follow a routine order of 1) site analysis, 2) planning, 3) basic design, and 4) creating a working drawing in the architectural design studios of universities in Korea. ...
Representing visual experiences is an essential part of architectural design education for creativity. The representation of creative ideas relates to the ability to communicate spatial design concepts. This study examined whether filmic spaces could function as visual communication to enhance students’ creative thinking in architecture. It explored how creativity can be supported throughout an architectural design studio with a conceptual tool that translates filmic spaces into spatial design. To investigate the ways to translate filmic space into spatial design tools for creative thinking, we conducted a design studio with first-year university students. Focusing on using various elements of film, including movement, frame, montage, light, and color, and scene changes to represent architectural languages, a curriculum was developed and implemented in a Visual Communication Design Studio for one semester, stimulating students to engage in expressing their ideas in three-dimensional spaces. The overall results suggested that the design education method that used the filmic space as a stimulating tool for creative thinking, emphasizing the role of visual communication, could enhance students’ creative thinking, leading to improved creative design processes.
... The importance of nurturing students' creative thinking in design education has been emphasized by many researchers and educators because creativity is a crucial part of architectural design. Critical design thinking can be a powerful way to motivate various design ideas by allowing an interactive understanding of an ill-defined design problem; thus, researchers have tried to find effective methods to stimulate students' creative thinking [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Design education has generally been delivered to students via teachers' subjective teaching methods rather than through a systematic academic approach [9]. ...
... Design education is related to the teaching methods that educate students to acquire relevant knowledge or skills. Students are generally educated to develop logical and convergent thinking for correct answers; therefore, they tend to adopt linear thinking even when solving ill-defined design problems in architectural design [2,6]. Most students follow a routine order of (1) site analysis, (2) planning, (3) basic design, and (4) creating a working drawing in the architectural design studios of universities in Korea. ...
Representing visual experiences is an essential part of architectural design education for creativity. The representation of creative ideas relates to the ability to communicate spatial design concepts. This study examined whether filmic spaces could function as visual communication to enhance students’ creative thinking in architecture. It explored how creativity can be supported throughout an architectural design studio with a conceptual tool that translates filmic spaces into spatial design. To investigate the ways to translate filmic space into spatial design tools for creative thinking, we conducted a design studio with first-year university students. Focusing on using various elements of film, including movement, frame, montage, light, and color, and scene changes to represent architectural languages, a curriculum was developed and implemented in a Visual Communication Design Studio for one semester, stimulating students to engage in expressing their ideas in three-dimensional spaces. The overall results suggested that the design education method that used the filmic space as a stimulating tool for creative thinking, emphasizing the role of visual communication, could enhance students’ creative thinking, leading to improved creative design processes.
... Expertise is perceived in, and has evolved within, a learning context, that is, expertise is assumed to be learned (Syer et al. 2003). As Han and Mi (2017) concluded that design education is concerned with teaching methods or strategies by which students are educated to obtain the relevant knowledge or skills. At present work, through eye movements analysis, we can have clear insight into advanced students' strategies using analogical reasoning and find the deficiencies of beginning students' strategies, which can support beginning students grow to maturity by learning advanced students' strategies and thus makes an improvement in their design strategies during the early stage of design process. ...
In existing studies about analogical reasoning during idea generation in design, there is lack in quantitative and objective evidences showing the relationship between expertise and the analogy distance. To advance such a state, in this study 43 participants (beginning and advanced students) took part in a design task and their eye movements such as fixation time and saccades were compared. Besides, quantitative analysis of sketches and retrospective interviews were conducted to further explore the relationship between the analogy distance, the fixation level and expertise. The results showed that: (1) compared to advanced students who equally distributed their attention among the three analogy domains, beginning students fixed significantly more on distant domain, although they both used more near and medium analogies in their solutions; (2) beginning students markedly outperformed advanced students in both between-domain and within-domain saccades; (3) beginning students create more ideas and get into high-level design fixation, contrary to advanced students who create a small number of alternative ideas and perform a low level of design fixation. The results clearly offer more accurate and objective evidences showing significant relationships between the cognitive activities of analogical reasoning and expertise and analogy distance, which will bring greater clarity in using analogy in design and teaching analogical reasoning in design education.
... Glen et al. (2014) recommended design thinking approach to the MBA teaching-learning process because future managers have to develop exploratory skills and apply to messy ill-structured contexts. Choi and Kim (2017) recommended that teaching-learning strategies should emphasize analogical and metaphorical reasoning to harness design thinking skills among students. Kimbell (2011) analyzed how and why there is growing attention to design thinking beyond the domain of design science. ...
Design Thinking has been a subject of teaching, research and real-life application in almost every domain and area of education, research and industrial endeavor for the past many years. This paper explains how to recognize the tenets of constructivist learning theory (constructivist principles) within the teaching-learning of the Design Thinking process. The research, established an integrative approach to theory, method, and practice by developing a taxonomy of constructivist principles to map the process and activities of design thinking. The paper further picks up the thread of developing and fine-tuning a Design Thinking course by presenting, what we call
as the “constructivism tenets-design thinking dashboard” which, while being suitable for business schools (Master of Business Administration), is generic enough to be used with minimal modifications for any other domains where customer experience is important, which is the case for all human endeavours.
... It is expected to enhance the quality of domestic preschool education and promote children's healthy growth. Choi & Kim (2017) regarded just world belief as an individual believing that they were living in a just world. The belief in the world being just allowed an individual believing that the physical and social environment was stable and well-organized. ...
... • Problem-solving by analogy involves the adoption or adaption of solutions developed for analogous situations, treating these situations as a body of knowledge to draw on. This approach is common in both traditional and computational design processes (Choi and Kim 2017;Gero 2000;Rosenman and Gero 1993). • Heuristic problem-solving uses self-discovery or pragmatic "rules of thumb" to identify obvious or pragmatic solutions (Wang and Chiew 2010). ...
This chapter uses the results of two studies to develop an understanding of different types of design strategies and their connection to creativity in design. Two sets of experimental data are used to capture these strategies and then correlate them to readings of novice or expert practices, and the production of conventional or creative designs. The first study identifies three effective design strategies during the conceptual design stage: drawing-reflection, graphical-goal forwarding and textual-goal forwarding. The second study identifies two generative strategies in parametric design for developing creative solutions and products: problem-forwarding and solution-reflecting. The chapter explains these strategies and links them to past research about design cognition and creativity.
... Metaphors shift the interpretation from one conceptual understanding to a new point of view, a so-called "ontological shift", while analogy is a cognitive process referring to conceptual parallels. Choi and Kim (2017) also suggest that analogical and metaphorical reasoning can be used to develop creative design thinking in tertiary education. This set of theories and the other cognitive models mentioned in this section have facilitated formal studies on creativity across multiple disciplines. ...
This chapter provides a background to the concept of “design thinking”, as it is defined and used in the field of design research. Thereafter, the chapter introduces three themes in design thinking—creativity, collaboration and culture—which have become increasingly important in the last decade. It briefly describes the content and structure of the present book, which includes detailed explanations, explorations and developments of design thinking in terms of creativity, collaboration and culture. In addition, throughout this book, empirical studies of these themes are typically presented using data derived from protocol analyses of experiments, sometimes coupled with expert assessment. Thus, this chapter also outlines these methods and their capacity to support exploration of design cognition, processes and activities.
... Divergent thinking represents the potential for creative thinking and problem solving (Runco, 1999) and it enables our minds to go far from the pre-constructed patterns of thinking. As well as it's relation with pretense, divergent thinking is generally associated with the design process (Pereira, 1999;Lawson, 2005;Liikkanen, 2010;Choi & Kim, 2017). Since there may be more than one optimal solution to a design problem (Lawson, 2005) divergent thinking is used to see alternative ways to produce a wide range of different ideas. ...
... This method assumes that people can generate new ideas more effectively if they have experienced, or have associations with, similar problems (Kim & Park, 2017). This is followed by incubation, which allows the unconscious mind to process information and is a significant next step toward allowing people who are fixated on certain ideas to move forward (Choi & Kim, 2017). ...
Background:
This study investigated the effectiveness of a modified hybrid brainstorming (MHB) program against conventional brainstorming (CB) to achieve idea generation during innovation initiatives in nursing.
Method:
Pretest and posttest outcomes comparing the two brainstorming methods were tested during a training exercise (N = 56). The MHB group (n = 29) was trained to apply CB for problem identification and MHB for idea generation. The CB group (n = 27) was trained to apply only CB.
Results:
The MHB method significantly enhanced idea fluency, flexibility, and originality from pretest to posttest (p < .05) and increased idea fluency and originality to a greater extent than the CB method.
Conclusion:
The MHB learning program can enhance nurses' innovative idea generation by promoting idea fluency and originality. [J Contin Educ Nurs. 2021;52(2):72-78.].
... Divergent thinking represents the potential for creative thinking and problem solving (Runco, 1999) and it enables our minds to go far from the pre-constructed patterns of thinking. As well as it's relation with pretense, divergent thinking is generally associated with the design process (Pereira, 1999;Lawson, 2005;Liikkanen, 2010;Choi & Kim, 2017). Since there may be more than one optimal solution to a design problem (Lawson, 2005) divergent thinking is used to see alternative ways to produce a wide range of different ideas. ...
... There are several elements such as models, procedures, and techniques of teaching that can promote critical thinking and problem-solving skills of the learners. Moreover, it is important that information technology and computer technology be applied and utilized to support and promote learning in an effective manner [6]. ...
This research is the development of the online instruction with design-based thinking for the construction of creative products. The population of this research included experts and the first year undergraduate students from the Department of Educational Innovation and Technology, Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University. According to the results, it is found that (1) the quality of the online lessons with design-based thinking is at a very high level, (2) the scores of learning achievement after learning the said online lessons are higher than those before learning these online lessons with a significance level of .01, (3) the scores of creative products created by the students after learning through the online lessons are at a very good level, and (4) the satisfaction toward the learning through online lessons with designbased thinking for the construction of creative products is at a very high level.
Developing countries like Colombia have understood that education is an effective strategy in closing social inequality gaps to improve population’s skills. In the last decade, coverage in higher education went from 30 to 50 percent. One of the most important factors in this achievement is Colombia’s transition to peace, increasing the development of the population towards higher levels of competitiveness and education. In consequence, it is necessary to reinforce the development of competences, to encourage systemic thinking that allows the solution of problems from a holistic view and achieves effective solutions in the improvement of the local industry. During this study, an applied ludic strategy involving an airplane assembly line made with Lego blocks is created, looking for an effective and practical education framework in teaching the attributes that generate impact in a production line of goods; in this way, students can be involved in a clear and creative manner in their search for solutions. This project was developed by member professors and students from an engineering education institution in Bogotá, Colombia. The results show that through gamification, students develop skills to take decisions leading to increase the production’s competitiveness from a systemic thinking view.
Design thinking has become one of the most effective forms of instruction for developing competence and skills of people in the 21st century. Instructors have increasingly employed this approach to facilitate the students’ learning effectiveness in an educational setting. Little research has been conducted on the examination of the complexity of integrative development, from the different aspect of skills facilitated by design thinking in Psychology courses. The study was conducted in two stages and had two aims. The first aim was to develop a Questionnaire on Learning Experiences in Design Thinking (QLEDT), and the second was to propose an integrative development framework for design thinking. A total of 105 students from two courses participated in the study. The quantitative results demonstrated that the interactive collaboration and integrative learning experience, including creativity, problem-solving, life-problem discovery, participation, and course content application, had a positive experience on the students. The qualitative results supported the findings of the questionnaire, and an integrative development framework of design thinking was proposed. Design thinking can stimulate the students’ competence in higher-order thinking skills, interactive collaboration, their characteristics (i.e., empathy, personality, self-confidence, self-worth), and their learning strategies.
How can new digital product development teams prototype new digital products without writing a line of code or spending a dime on software development to learn what customers love? We present Preto Vids, a digital and practical, research-based method for structured, evidence-based prototyping. This new prototyping technique is genuinely relevant for showcasing digital media's role in design-as-performance in concept development. Preliminary research has indicated that traditional prototyping methods do not provide an agile heuristic for digital product development teams. Furthermore, a critical examination of the prototyping approaches reveals uncharted territory regarding prototyping as an agile product development methodology. In the context of new product development, Preto Vids reduces many risks of building full digital projects, saves time, and affords easier value proposition communication and sharing and learning. In 5-7 steps, design teams can perform an iterative process to develop new product concepts without spending a penny on software development or writing a single code line.
In this chapter we will focus on many “prestudies and preanalysis of different Biomedical Engineering problems that need to be developed with specialized research projects applying Cognitive Learning and Reasoning (CL&R) algorithms, that can be integrated to the Proposed General Architecture framework of a Cognitive Computing Agents System (AI-CCAS),” with a special emphasis on “Cognitive Learning and its relationship with the neuroscience of reasoning, proposed as Cognitive Learning–Reasoning (CL&R) using Cognitive Computing (CC).” Through this book, we have studied many interactions of different “human illnesses, diseases, and disorders,” where “human illness” is defined as body damage that needs to be cured, such as infections, injuries, cell degeneration, etc.; “human diseases” are defined as states or reactions that must be managed, such as pain, discomfort, weakness, fatigue, etc.; and “human disorders” are defined as functional abnormalities that must be treated, such as physical, mental, genetic, emotional/behavioral, and functional issues. The complexity of the analysis needed is boundless, and it can only be analyzed through multidisciplinary sciences, via the interactions of fields such as “Biomedical Engineering,” “Neurology,” “Cognitive Sciences,” and “Computer Science” using tools with “exponential technologies” such as “Artificial intelligence (AI)” and others through its “continuous exponential evolution” that includes “Machine Learning”, “Deep Learning”, and “Cognitive Computing”, with the main purpose of obtaining useful “AI models” that can help to analyze human health problems. Now it is the time to apply them and many others in research challenge projects.
Purpose
New product development (NPD) is increasingly being delegated to consumers, yet little research has investigated consumer-centric factors that may influence this delegation. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to uniquely combine regulatory focus and analogical reasoning to investigate new product ideation and downstream consumer-brand responses.
Design/methodology/approach
A series of experiments were undertaken.
Findings
Study 1 revealed that promotion-focused consumers (as opposed to prevention-focused consumers) have significantly greater purchase intentions if given an analogical reasoning task before engaging in new product ideation due to their cognitive flexibility. Study 2 tested the effects of near vs far analogies and found that promotion-focused consumers use analogical thinking to a greater extent and have significantly higher purchase intentions if primed with far analogies because regulatory fit is enhanced. However, analogical thinking and purchase intentions significantly drop if primed with near analogies. In contrast, prevention-focused consumers use analogical thinking to a greater extent and have significantly higher purchase intentions if shown near analogies, compared to far analogies, because of improved regulatory fit. Both studies confirm a serial mediation chain involving task engagement, self-brand connection, and brand sincerity.
Research limitations/implications
This research extends current understanding regarding the role of creative tasks within consumer NPD. It also uniquely links regulatory focus and consumer task engagement in NPD to increase favorable brand responses.
Practical implications
Findings offer managerial insights that can positively increase consumer-brand outcomes during NPD.
Originality/value
This is one of the first studies to demonstrate the importance of analogical thinking and consumer-centric factors (i.e., regulatory focus) during the NPD process. This avenue of research is important, as most studies have neglected ways in which to increase consumer NPD task engagement, leaving resources unutilized.
This study advances the contextual understanding of knowledge management practices adopted by tourism consultants in the setting of tourism development projects. It goes beyond the traditional understanding of the bounded nature of firms to analyse knowledge management issues through a project-based multi-layered perspective, namely project ecology. An innovative participant-observation methodology is utilised to study 15 episodic projects at three tourism development companies over a 12-month period. This provides an insider perspective to enhance understanding of the knowledge management practices and collaborations of tourism consultants. The study reveals two underlying logics that shape knowledge management practices: the logics of creativity and accumulation. The findings exhibit how knowledge management is moulded by the practices within, and interactions among, the four tiers of a multi-level project-specific contextual framework.
South East Asia is undergoing massive development in many sectors, so do the education. Good education needs a high quality teacher. SEA Teacher Project is a project held by SEAMEO to revitalize teacher education. Practicum for pre-service teachers plays a big role in the development of teacher in the future. Departing from SEA Teacher Project’s goals, this case study research aimed to explore how the teachers in the practice schools provided analogies and used visual aids in chemistry learning and how were student teachers’ perspectives in chemistry learning. The participants were 4 chemistry pre-service student teachers who experienced this program between 2016 and 2019. This research also explored the issues and challenges in the field to improve chemistry pre-service student teachers’ preparation, the fruitfulness of the program based on pre-service student teachers’ perspective. The results showed that analogies and visual aids are strengthen each other in chemistry learning. The SEA Teacher Project held by 2016 to 2019 has given significant experience of teaching for the participants.
Resumen:
Los arquitectos tienen un importante rol que cumplir como generadores de alternativas de desarrollo social, brindando opciones que faciliten la coexistencia de las comunidades y la naturaleza bajo las premisas del desarrollo sostenible. Esto plantea la necesidad de repensar los enfoques pedagógicos y las estrategias de enseñanza con la misión de preparar a los futuros arquitectos frente a la agudización de las problemáticas ambientales y sociales. Por otro lado, la paulatina inmersión, obligada o espontánea, de la arquitectura en el ámbito científico, crea la necesidad de documentar y sistematizar el proceso de investigación propio de la disciplina y, a su vez, tener en cuenta el proceso creativo de la obra arquitectónica. En este artículo se presenta el proceso de investigación-creación propuesto por el programa de Arquitectura de la Universidad de la Costa en Barranquilla (Colombia), con el objetivo de contribuir a la discusión y a la ampliación del estado del arte sobre el tema. Al final, se plantea un método de aprendizaje del proyecto arquitectónico con un enfoque investigativo, el cual pretende fortalecer la capacidad resolutiva en el estudiante, ante la complejidad de las necesidades humanas y ambientales.
Palabras Clave:
Investigación, Entornos Vulnerables, Sostenibilidad, Arquitectura.
Abstract:
Architects have an important role to play as generators of social development alternatives, that allow communities and nature to coexist in a harmonious way, following the principles of sustainable development. This raises the need to rethink pedagogical approaches and teaching strategies to prepare future architects against the worsening of environmental and social problems. On the other hand, the gradual immersion, forced or spontaneous, of architecture in the scientific field, creates the need to document and systematize the research process appropriate to the discipline and, at the same time, consider the creative process of architectural work. This article presents the research-creation process proposed by the Universidad de la Costa in Barranquilla (Colombia), with the aim of contributing to the discussion and the broadening of the state of the art on the subject. In the end, a method of learning the architectural project with a research approach is proposed, which aims to strengthen the student's ability to solve the problem, given the complexity of human and environmental needs.
Keywords:
Investigation, Vulnerable surroundings, Sustainability, Architecture.
The aim of this study is to develop a unique application based on a combination of distinct disciplines brought together by thematic approach in Social Studies course. This study investigated the effect of a developed application on students' academic achievement and creative thinking skills. Interviews were conducted with students. Of mixed methods, the Embedded Design was the research model of choice as it is dominated by the quantitative approach and supported by the qualitative approach. The “Torrance Test of Creative Thinking” was used to quantitatively collect data on the change in students' creative thinking skills while "Academic Achievement Test Questions" were developed to collect data on the change in students' academic achievement. "Semi-structured Interview Forms" and "Student Detective Files" were the qualitative data collection tools used in the study. The former enabled students to evaluate the process while the latter included activities prepared within the scope of the application. Results show that the application caused a statistically significant difference in creative thinking skills and academic achievement. Interviews reveal that experimental group positively assessed all designed activities. Activities positively affected students' feelings and thoughts towards social sciences and Social Studies course. Students associated the social science course with different disciplines (Sciences, Turkish, Mathematics, Religion, Law, Health, Safety etc.).
Improving creativity by learning bio-inspired design (BID) requires fluid intelligence to deeper comprehend biological phenomena. Biological phenomena abstraction is a primary part in BID to comprehend structures and principles of the phenomena. However, direct research on the role of fluid intelligence in the understanding stage in BID processes is relatively scarce. We observed forty-one design students’ pictorial and textual representations of the abstract structures and principles in a BID task. Participants’ fluid intelligence was assessed using Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices Plus (SPM+). At the same time, their biological phenomena abstraction in pictorial and textual representations were rated based on a five-point scale of form, behavior, and principle. Results showed that fluid intelligence had a limited effect on biological phenomena abstraction. Participants with low fluid intelligence had a disadvantage on biological phenomena abstraction while participants with medium and high fluid intelligence had equally good performance. The results suggested that medium fluid intelligence was the minimal requirement of biological phenomena abstraction for male participants. We argue that future work should consider multiple intelligence in biological phenomena abstraction of BID.
Prior studies have indicated that multiple knowledge structures, schema, associations, and cases, are involved in creative thought. Few studies, however, have examined how these different knowledge structures operate together in idea generation and creative problem-solving. Accordingly, in the present study 247 undergraduates were asked to generate ideas relevant to a social innovation problem and then provide a potential solution to the problem. A training manipulation was used to encourage application of schematic, associational, or case-based knowledge either alone or in combination. It was found that prompting use of a single knowledge structure, specifically schema or associational knowledge, resulted in the production of more high quality ideas. However, prompting use of multiple knowledge structures, specifically combining either schema or associations with cases, resulted in the production of higher quality and more original problem-solutions. The implications of these findings for understanding the role of different knowledge structures in creative thought are discussed.
Background: During the last decade a considerable amount of research on creativity enhancement has been undertaken within the design education. It is essential to establish an educational platform
which encourages students’ creative thinking. This paper aims to review mainstream studies undertaken between 2003 and 2012, to identify the research concentration and paucity and to propose important issues to be considered in future design education.
Methods: From 10 domestic design journals and 7 international design journals, through three steps of selection procedure, a total of 61 articles related to creativity enhancements in design education were selected and classified according to their key contents and target areas.
Results: The studies were categorized into three main categories: design education method, idea conception and development, and design strategy. Each category is divided into sub-categories such
as the application of theories in design education, design curriculum, stimulation elements etc. Compare to domestic research, international research has more various perspectives and approaches to design education studies.
Conclusion: Through the result of this research, we found that more systematic research frameworks need to be developed and reasoning techniques are critical to the creative thinking in design. This research can be a basis for the future research direction emphasizing creativity enhancement in design education.
Computational support for designing began in the early 1960s, and has had a considerable influence. Only recently has there been the possibility of providing computational support for innovative and creative designing. This paper presents a number of computational models of creative designing; including combination, transformation, analogy, emergence, and first principles as a representative set. It describes them within a uniform framework and indicates the potential of having such models on technological change in a society where designers are the change agents of the physical world.
Although both the academic and the trade literature have widely acknowledged the need to foster the development of more-innovative products, little empirical research has examined the cognitive processes underlying the creation of these novel product concepts. In this research, three empirical studies examine how analogical thinking influences the idea-generation stage of the new product development process. The first study uses the verbal protocols of real-world industrial designers to trace the role of analogy in the context of a new product development task, and the second and third studies use an experimental approach to assess the effectiveness of different ideation strategies and conditions. Findings from these studies indicate that the originality of the resulting product design is influenced by the extent of analogical transfer, the type of analogies used, and the presence of external primes. In addition, these studies reveal a positive relationship between the originality of the product concept and consumers' willingness to pay for it, an important measure in the concept-testing phase of product development.
Free production of variability through unfettered divergent thinking holds out the seductive promise of effortless creativity, but runs the risk of generating only quasi-creativity or pseudo-creativity if it is not adapted to reality. Thus, creative thinking seems to involve two components: generation of novelty (via divergent thinking) and evaluation of the novelty (via convergent thinking). In the area of convergent thinking, knowledge is of particular importance: It is a source of ideas, suggests pathways to solutions, and provides criteria of effectiveness and novelty. The way in which the two kinds of thinking work together can be understood in terms of thinking styles or of phases in the generation of creative products. In practical situations, divergent thinking without convergent thinking can cause a variety of problems including reckless change. None the less, care must be exercised by those who sing the praises of convergent thinking: Both too little and too much is bad for creativity.
Laboratory-based studies of problem solving suggest that transfer of solution principles from an analogue to a target arises only minimally without the presence of directive hints. Recently, however, real-world studies indicate that experts frequently and spontaneously use analogies in domain-based problem solving. There is also some evidence that in certain circumstances domain novices can draw analogies designed to illustrate arguments. It is less clear, however, whether domain novices can invoke analogies in the sophisticated manner of experts to enable them to progress problem solving. In the current study groups of novices and experts tackled large-scale management problems. Spontaneous analogising was observed in both conditions, with no marked differences between expertise levels in the frequency, structure, or function of analogising. On average four analogies were generated by groups per hour, with significantly more relational mappings between analogue and target being produced than superficial object-and-attribute mappings. Analogising served two different purposes: problem solving (dominated by relational mappings), and illustration (which for novices was dominated by object-and-attribute mappings). Overall, our novices showed a sophistication in domain-based analogical reasoning that is usually only observed with experts, in addition to a sensitivity to the pragmatics of analogy use.
Designers, during a conceptual design process, do not just synthesize solutions that satisfy initially given requirements, but also invent design issues or requirements that capture important aspects of the given problem. How do they do this? What becomes the impetus for the invention of important issues or requirements? So-called `unexpected discoveries', the acts of attending to visuo-spatial features in sketches which were not intended when they were drawn, are believed to contribute to it. The purpose of the present research is to verify this hypothesis. Analysing the cognitive processes of a practising architect in a design session, we found that in about a half of his entire design process there were bi-directional relations between unexpected discoveries and the invention of issues or requirements. Not only did unexpected discoveries become the driving force for the invention of issues or requirements, but also the occurrence of invention, in turn, tended to cause new unexpected discoveries. This has provided empirical evidence for two anecdotal views of designing. First, designing is a situated act; designers invent design issues or requirements in a way situated in the environment in which they design. We call inventions of this sort situated-invention (S-invention). Secondly, a design process progresses in such a way that the problem-space and the solution-space co-evolve. Further, this has brought a pedagogical implication as well as an insight about an important aspect of learning by experience in design.
. This paper introduces a model for design exploration based on notions of evolution and demonstrates computational co-evolution using a modified genetic algorithm (GA). Evolution is extended to consider co-evolution where two systems evolve in response to each other. Co-evolution in design exploration supports the change, over time, of the design solution and the design requirements. The basic GA, which does not support our exploration model, evaluates individuals from a population of design solutions with an unchanged fitness function. This approach to evaluation implements search with a prefixed goal. Modifications to the basic GA are required to support exploration. Two approaches to implement a co-evolving GA are: a combined gene approach and a separate spaces approach. The combined gene approach includes the representation of the requirements and the solution within the genotype. The separate spaces approach models the requirements and the solutions as separately evolving interac...
The subject of creativity has been neglected by psychologists. The immediate problem has two aspects. (1) How can we discover creative promise in our children and our youth, (2) How can we promote the development of creative personalities. Creative talent cannot be accounted for adequately in terms of I.Q. A new way of thinking about creativity and creative productivity is seen in the factorial conceptions of personality. By application of factor analysis a fruitful exploratory approach can be made. Carefully constructed hypotheses concerning primary abilities will lead to the use of novel types of tests. New factors will be discovered that will provide us with means to select individuals with creative personalities. The properties of primary abilities should be studied to improve educational methods and further their utilization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Over the course of the last half century, numerous training programs intended to develop creativity capacities have been proposed. In this study, a quantitative meta-analysis of program evaluation efforts was conducted. Based on 70 prior studies, it was found that well-designed creativity training programs typically induce gaïns in performance with these effects generalizing across criteria, settings, and target populations. Moreover, these effects held when internal validity considerations were taken into account. An examination of the factors contributing to the relative effectiveness of these training programs indicated that more successful programs were likely to focus on development of cognitive skills and the heuristics involved in skill application, using realistic exercises appropriate to the domain at hand. The implications of these observations for the development of creativity through educational and training interventions are discussed along with directions for future research.
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In the last few years, "Design Thinking" has gained popularity—it is now seen as an exciting new paradigm for dealing with problems in sectors as a far afield as IT, Business, Education and Medicine. This potential success challenges the design research community to provide clear and unambiguous answers to two key questions: "What is the nature of design think-ing?" and "What could it bring to other professions?". In this paper we sketch a provisional answer to these questions by first considering the reasoning pattern behind design thinking, and then enriching this picture by linking in key concepts from models of design activity and design thinking that have emerged over the last twenty years of design research.
Analogy and similarity are often assumed to be distinct psychological processes. In contrast to this position, the authors suggest that both similarity and analogy involve a process of structural alignment and mapping, that is, that similarity is like analogy. In this article, the authors first describe the structure-mapping process as it has been worked out for analogy. Then, this view is extended to similarity, where it is used to generate new predictions. Finally, the authors explore broader implications of structural alignment for psychological processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A wide range of formal methods have been devised and used for idea generation in conceptual design. Experimental evidence is needed to support claims regarding the effectiveness of these methods in promoting idea generation in engineering design. Towards that goal this paper presents a set of effectiveness metrics experimental methods, data collection and analysis techniques. Statistically based Design of Experiments (DOE) principles were used in developing the guidelines. Four classes of operating variables were considered to characterize the design problem and the environment. The effectiveness metrics proposed are based on outcome and consists of the quantity, quality, novelty, and variety of ideas generated. Two experimental approaches have been developed. In the Direct Method. the influence of the! type of design problem and various parameters related to the procedure of an idea generation method is measured by using the method in its entirety. In the Indirect Method each idea generation method is decomposed into key components and its overall effectiveness is predicted by experimentally studying the effectiveness of its components and their mutual interactions. [S1050-0472(00)02004-3].
We tested 462 primary students (244 boys and 218 girls) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 from 20 primary schools in Hong Kong. Their ideationalfluency was assessed by using 2 items each on 3 types of verbal tasks (instances, uses, and similarities) and 2 types of figural tasks (pattern meanings and line meanings) from the Wallach-Kogan tests. On the average, students generated about 20 instances, gave 9 alternative uses of a common object, listed 11 possible similarities between a pair of named objects, and gave 13 and 15 possible meanings for visual patterns and lines, respectively. Although boys scored consistently higher in ideational fluency than girls on verbal tasks, significant gender differences did not emerge for figural tasks. Significantly higher scores on ideational fluency were evident for students in higher grades especially for verbal tasks. The use of the Wallach-Kogan tests in the assessment of divergent thinking ability and creativity for Chinese children is discussed.
Increasingly, perches for laying hens are being made from metals and plastics. There is nothing in the literature regarding how easily birds jump between perches of different materials, or how their ability to do so changes with faecal contamination of the perches. Forty-four medium hybrid brown hens negotiated perches of wood (5 cm × 5 cm, rounded edges), metal (half-round section, diameter 4 cm) or poly-vinyl-chloride (PVC: circular section, diameter 4 cm), which were either clean or dirty (poultry manure 0.5-1.0 cm deep). The time to jump to the destination perch (0.75 m from the start perch), number of squats (pre-jumping behaviour), slips, failures to jump (in 300 s) and crashes were recorded. Compared to wood and metal perches, birds took significantly longer to jump from PVC perches when they were clean, but there was no difference when the perches were dirty. Birds slipped significantly more on clean metal or PVC perches compared to clean wood perches. The birds took significantly longer to jump from metal or wooden perches when they were dirty compared to when they were clean. These data may suggest that PVC is not a suitable material for perches. Slipperiness is important. The birds apparently found the metal and PVC perch more slippery than the wooden perch, although the metal perch did not cause the birds to delay jumping. A slippery perch may deter the birds from attempting to jump. Manure on the perches reduced the slipperiness of the metal and PVC perches. Once perches become dirty, any welfare issues concerning the risk of injury from slippery perches cease to be as important as the potential slipperiness of the manure itself.
REPORTS ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE STUDY OF CREATIVITY. BEGINNING WITH GALTON'S STUDIES ON THE IMPACT OF HEREDITY UPON GENIUS, GUILFORD POINTS OUT THAT RELATIVELY FEW PSYCHOLOGISTS HAVE TURNED THEIR ATTENTION TO THIS PROBLEM. ONLY THOSE WHO HAVE A PARTICULAR INTEREST IN THE MEASUREMENT OF INTELLECTUAL CAPACITY HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO AVOID CONTACT WITH THE CREATIVE ASPECT OF MAN BUT THE HISTORY OF THE INTELLIGENCE TEST MOVEMENT SHOWS THAT IN ITS EARLY DEVELOPMENT IT HAS BEEN SINGULARLY DEVOID OF CONTACT WITH MEASURES OF INGENUITY, INNOVATIVE CAPACITY, OR INVENTIVENESS. SOME NONPSYCHOLOGICAL ATTEMPTS AT ATTACKING THE PROBLEM OF CREATIVITY ARE DISCUSSED. SINCE 1950 EFFORTS TO ESTABLISH THE NATURE OF CREATIVITY HAVE BEEN SOMEWHAT MORE FRUITFUL AND THE PROMISE OF MORE EFFECTIVE BASIC RESEARCH ON CREATIVE THINKING IS DISCUSSED. (32 REF.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The gestalt psychologists proposed that restructuring (
Umstrukturierung) is an essential process in thinking. This concept has not been integrated into the information-processing theory of problem solving. As a preparation for such an integration, the gestalt writings about restructuring in problem solving are summarized in a set of principles. Critical scrutiny shows that some gestalt principles are overstated; others have very weak empirical support. But the psychological reality of restructuring is not in doubt, in spite of the recent crtiticism by R. W. Weisberg and J. W. Alba (see record
1982-02568-001). A unified theory of thinking should interpret restructuring in information-processing terms and explain the relation between restructuring and search. (40 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
consider the growth of evidence showing intelligence testing to offer but a limited window on giftedness / describe the rise of creativity testing as an alternative that is expected to help elucidate giftedness where intelligence testing has shown itself to be limited / discussion of some widespread but dubious practices in the use of creativity tests that have arisen in the wake of their recent popularity
suggest that a shift from creativity and intelligence testing toward discipline-centered or field-specific approaches for facilitating giftedness is currently taking place (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In the last few years, “Design Thinking” has gained popularity – it is now seen as an exciting new paradigm for dealing with problems in sectors as far a field as IT, Business, Education and Medicine. This potential success challenges the design research community to provide unambiguous answers to two key questions: “What is the core of Design Thinking?” and “What could it bring to practitioners and organisations in other fields?”. We sketch a partial answer by considering the fundamental reasoning pattern behind design, and then looking at the core design practices of framing and frame creation. The paper ends with an exploration of the way in which these core design practices can be adopted for organisational problem solving and innovation.Highlights► Analysing design reasoning in terms of abduction. ► Presenting a framework for the description of design practices. ► Investigating the creation of new frames as a key design practice. ► Describing the different levels on which design (framing) practices can impact organisations.
There is a feeling among many design educators today that the discipline has reached a crisis in its development, and that change is needed immediately in the way that design educators articulate their epistemology and their methodology. The architectural studio can be seen as the model for design education, and its culture is exemplary. Donald Schön has often argued that the professional education of architectural students – and other design students – should be aimed at making them into ‘reflective practitioners’. At the core of his argument is the idea that design education must sacrifice intellectual rigour in order to achieve social relevance, yet critics have argued that this trade-off has caused design education to be marginalised in relation to the university model of education. Design is focused on subjective creativity, but the positivist university paradigm is focused on objective rationality. In order for design education to become more rigorous – and more academically respectable – it must either become more rational or it must embrace a new paradigm that values creative experience. This article argues that the emerging paradigm of complexity offers design education the rigour it has been lacking, for this paradigm constructs studio projects not as problems with rational solutions but as systems that need to be explored in order to discover their relational meanings and values – precisely what creativity, balanced with rationality, can accomplish in both Western nations and rapidly developing East Asian nations such as China.
In this paper a ‘creative design process’ is proposed, based on an integration between a modernised consensus view of both the design process from engineering design and the creative process from cognitive psychology. In addition, a composite definition of a creative design output is also formed, taking elements from the different design types proposed in engineering design and the creative outputs proposed in psychology. This integrated process and the composite definition are further linked, thus providing a descriptive model the different design operations are linked to the types of design output produced.
This paper aims to further an understanding of the nature and function of analogising and mental simulation in design through an analysis of the transcripts of two engineering design meetings. Analogies were coded for ‘purpose’ and in terms of whether they were within-domain or between-domain. Mental simulations were coded for ‘focus’: technical/functional or end-user. All expressions of uncertainty were also identified. Analogies were found to be typically between-domain (indicative of innovative reasoning) and were evenly distributed across solution generation, function finding and explanation. Mental simulations were predominantly technical/functional. Our most striking observation was that analogies and mental simulations were associated with conditions of uncertainty. We propose that analogising and mental simulation are strategies deployed to resolve uncertainty – a claim that is supported by the fact that uncertainty levels returned to baseline values at the end of analogising and simulation episodes.
Data from protocol studies of nine experienced industrial designers, performing the same task, were analysed to develop an expertise model of the product design process. The protocol data and the expertise model were used to identify four different cognitive strategies employed by the designers: problem driven, solution driven, information driven, and knowledge driven design strategies. These strategies were then related to task outcomes such as solution quality and creativity, and to process aspects such as iterative activity. The different strategies appear not to be related to overall solution quality in any straightforward manner. Designers using a solution driven strategy tended to have lower overall solution quality scores but higher creativity scores. Designers using a problem driven design strategy tended to produce the best results in terms of the balance of both overall solution quality and creativity.
The purpose of this study was to investigate divergent thinking and evaluative skill as important processes in the development of creative thinking in elementary schoolchildren. Children from the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades (N = 117) received divergent thinking tasks and measures of evaluative accuracy. The latter indicated how well they liked various ideas (i.e., their preferences) and the degree to which the children believed those ideas to be original. Results indicated that the accuracy of their originality judgments increased significantly with age, as did the preference for appropriate ideas. Unlike previous research, evaluative scores were not related to divergent thinking test scores. Also somewhat surprising, given earlier research, was the lack of a "4th-grade slump." In fact, there was a significant peak, rather than slump, in the divergent thinking of 4th-grade children, at least in the raw fluency scores. When fluency ratio scores were compared, there were still some incidents of a 4th-grade peak, but there was also a significant decline with grade in the proportions of 1 index of highly appropriate ideas. Although a relation was not found between evaluative skill and divergent thinking raw fluency scores, an increasing preference for appropriate square ideas was found to contribute significantly to the prediction of decreases in the proportion of high-quality round ideas given. Possible explanations are given to account for this unexpected finding, including differences in interpersonal and intrapersonal evaluative skills, and the distinction between the ability to accurately identify original or appropriate ideas and choosing to selectively express such ideas.
Analogy was studied in real-world engineering design, using the in vivo method. Analogizing was found to occur frequently, entailing a roughly equal amount of within- and between-domain analogies. In partial support for theories of unconscious plagiarism (Brown & Murphy, 1989; Marsh, Landau, & Hicks, 1996) and Ward's (1994) path-of-least-resistance model, it was found that the reference to exemplars (in the form of prototypes) significantly reduced the number of between-domain analogies between source and target, as compared with using sketches or no external representational systems. Analogy served three functions in relation to novel design concepts: identifying problems, solving problems, and explaining concepts. Problem identifying analogies were mainly within domain, explanatory analogies were mainly between domain, and problem-solving analogies were a mixture of within- and between-domain analogies.