Generating Alternatives: Enhancing Creativity in the Design of Information Systems

“该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。“创新是设计的一个目标，有时是难以捉摸的。 在这个项目中，PI和他的团队将在一个主？的过程中的信息系统设计，构建和测试一系列的练习，旨在促进创新设计，灵感来自思考一般的创意过程，特别是信息技术设计过程。 信息设计是研究和促进创造性过程的理想平台，因为信息系统的拓扑结构允许开发用于客观表示设计的准确性，可变性和相似性的工具。 将制定和测试三套日益广泛和复杂的练习。 第一组将使用IT设计元素（节点和链接）和基本拓扑结构（树和集线器）的启动进行探索，以引出初始设计问题的更高级和更具创造性的解决方案。 第二组将使用鼓励抽象的技术，使学生能够跨领域转移设计。 第三组将采用设计拓扑的感知操作和设计拓扑的概念比较，以增加学生发明的设计解决方案的可变性。 用于表示和比较设计的工具将转变为鼓励产生各种新颖设计的工具。 由于实验将嵌入设计课程，练习将有利于学生和研究。 这样的工作需要一个具有多个学科专业知识的团队。 总的来说，PI和他的团队在人类理解和图表制作，教育方法的研究设计和评估以及软件密集型信息系统的设计方面具有专业知识。 该团队的预测和技术是基于他们之前在课堂环境中开发设计专业知识的工作;该团队已经开发了计算工具，作为拟议研究的基础。更广泛的影响：糟糕的设计和由此产生的糟糕的软件，阻碍了许多政府和企业机构的协调。 设计师教育的改善可能会通过他们在实践中的努力和在职业生涯中指导其他设计师来放大。 虽然有许多方法推荐的教学系统设计，其中很少有经验的测试。 这项研究是新颖的，它将着眼于IT设计的中间产品，拓扑草图，以了解创造力的认知过程。 从这一点上，PI将构建方法来评估和增加设计创新，这将是有用的其他研究人员和教师。 具体的影响应该包括改善系统设计教育，从而提高软件和社会系统的效率，由PI的毕业生和其他设计方案，这反过来又可以帮助我们改善广泛的人类活动。 这项研究具有变革的潜力，因为设计是我们与未来互动的方式。

"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."Innovation is a goal, sometimes elusive, of design. In this project the PI and his team will, within the context of a Master?s course in information system design, construct and test a series of exercises aimed at promoting innovative designs, inspired by thinking about creative processes in general and the information technology design process in particular. Information design is an ideal platform for the study and promotion of creative processes, because the topological structure of information systems allows development of tools for objective representation of the accuracy, variability, and similarity of designs. Three increasingly broad and sophisticated sets of exercises will be developed and tested. The first set will use exploratory play with the elements of IT design (nodes and links) and priming of fundamental topological structures (trees and hubs) in order to elicit more advanced and creative solutions for initial design problems. The second set will use techniques that encourage abstraction to enable students to transfer designs across domains. The third set will employ perceptual manipulation of design topology and conceptual comparisons of design topologies to increase the variability of design solutions students invent. The tool for representing and comparing designs will be turned into a tool for encouraging the generation of varied and novel designs. Because the experiments will be embedded in a design course, the exercises will benefit both the students and the research. Such an undertaking requires a team with expertise across several disciplines. Collectively, the PI and his team have expertise in human comprehension and production of diagrams, research design and evaluation of educational methods, and the design of software-intensive information systems. The team bases its predictions and techniques on their prior work on the development of design expertise in the classroom context; the team has already produced computational tools that serve as the foundation for the proposed research.Broader Impacts: Poor design, and the resulting poor software, impedes coordination in many government and corporate institutions. Improvements in the education of designers may be amplified by their efforts in practice and in mentoring other designers over the length of their careers. Although there are many methods recommended for teaching systems design, few of these have been empirically tested. This research is novel in that it will look at the intermediate product of IT design, topological sketches, in order to understand the cognitive processes of creativity. From this, the PI will construct methods to assess and to increase design innovation that will be useful to other researchers and instructors. Specific impacts should include improving systems design education, consequently improving the efficacy of software and social systems created by graduates of the PI's and other design programs, which in turn may help us improve a broad range of human activities. The research has the potential to be transformative, because design is the way we interact with the future.