MOD: Stimulating Creative Insight - A Cohesive Model of Design Innovation Across Individuals, Groups and Computer Agents

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Innovation occurs within the minds of designers, within design teams and within computational design engines, each having functional similarities. This project studies the critical elements of creativity and innovation by formally understanding the role of individual cognition in group environments and its relation to computational simulations of the process to enhance the innovation process. An examination of these interactions reveals a great congruence in the structuring of these complex cognitive and social interactions, and the elucidation of the form of that structure and the dynamics of its operation into a model of the innovation process is the major goal of this project. This study could significantly influence how design innovation is structured and pursued in industrial settings. As such, this unique interdisciplinary research in the area of innovation is an appropriate match to the SciSIP mission. This project rests on the assumption that an individual is working on a difficult design problem as part of a team effort. Often, iterative search within an individual mental representation makes improvements but yields no solution within that representation that meets the design goals. At that point the individual reaches an impasse or block. To overcome the impasse a new representation must emerge, one that occurs through search for a new representation coupled with inputs from the environment. At the individual level impasses can be overcome by appropriate stimuli at the appropriate time in the solution process, not too early and not too late. The model posits that team members collaborate to develop a common representation within which a solution is found. The individual's representations influence other group members' representations and contribute to the overall group representation, and group discussions stimulate changes to both the individual and effective group representation, the group inputs acting as the external environmental stimuli to overcome the impasses mentioned above. Individuals then work with and develop their own representation, and at times collaborate with the group to both challenge and expand the group's representation as they search for solutions to the design task. Software agents can emulate and support the group process, providing deeper understanding of the process and means to create a new type of design assist tools at the innovation level. The software agents use a given representation but, based on collaborative strategies, that representation can evolve as the agents work together as a team. This study develops: (1) an understanding of the common structural and dynamic operations that occur throughout the design process; (2) a better understanding of how humans solve difficult design problems; (3) a deeper understanding of how people represent design problems and a resultant method for changing representations of a problem so as to find creative solutions; (4) a computer tools that build on these findings to improve search of a design problem; (5) an understanding of the relationship between individual problem solving and group problem solving; (6) a methodology and algorithm for group design processes; (7) new methods to assist humans in the creative process both as individuals and, through more efficaciously linking individuals within teams, as teams, so as to empower that process; and (8) the emergence of an empirically anchored theoretical model of individual and group cognition in design. Formalizing a deeper understanding of how individuals participate and adapt in creative team problem solving, and how the team develops into a more efficient set of individuals is one broader outcome of this work. The cognitive understanding will inform the fundamental understanding of the cognition of creative problem solving and in particular design. Computational tools based on design agents can effectively generate innovative solutions.