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Full-Text Articles in Mechanical Engineering
A Study On The Effects Of Example Familiarity And Modality On Design Fixation, Vimal Viswanathan, Megan Tomko, Julie Linsey
A Study On The Effects Of Example Familiarity And Modality On Design Fixation, Vimal Viswanathan, Megan Tomko, Julie Linsey
Faculty Publications, Mechanical Engineering
Design fixation is a factor that negatively influences the generation of novel design concepts (Jansson & Smith, 1991). When designers fixate, they tend to reproduce example features or features from their initial ideas. In order to mitigate design fixation, it is crucial to identify the factors that influence the extent of design fixation. This paper investigates two such factors: the modality of examples and the familiarity of designers with the example features. To investigate this, an experiment is conducted with mechanical engineering students who were asked to generate ideas to solve a peanut sheller design problem. The students generated ideas …
Innovation Skills For Tomorrow’S Sustainable Designers, Julie Linsey, Vimal Viswanathan
Innovation Skills For Tomorrow’S Sustainable Designers, Julie Linsey, Vimal Viswanathan
Faculty Publications, Mechanical Engineering
Tomorrow’s sustainable designers will need an arsenal of tools for innovation. An approach for teaching design methods and innovation is described. A new approach for teaching design methods based on the use of analogous products to provide concrete experiences prior to the method’s application to a novel design problem was evaluated. Students’ opinions of the various design methods and their perceptions of the class’s influence on their creativity were also measured. Past experiments have shown that the presentation of example solutions has the potential to cause design fixation thus limiting the design solutions considered. Due to this, the teams’ final …