Major: Understanding and Aiding Problem Formulation in Creative Conceptual Design

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The research objective of this CreativeIT award is to study the major blocks to creativity that arise from the manner in which design problems are formulated. It will investigate why some engineering designers generate creative solutions while others converge on mundane ones, specifically examining the critical role played by formulation and representation in early conceptual design. A central idea of this research is that one can usefully cast problem formulation as a process of answering questions that reveal key characteristics of the design task. These include questions about design goals and objectives, relative priority of technical issues, relations among design parameters, conflicts and gaps in the problem statement, and fictitious constraints. This investigation will result in a dynamic representation, the Problem Map, which aims to characterize a designer's understanding of a problem at a given time. An interactive computational aid that lets users construct a Problem Map for a given design problem will be developed. The project differs from earlier efforts in that its focus is on problem formulation (that is pre-ideation), not just idea generation, and its emphasis on an interactive system that keeps humans in the loop rather than replacing them with automated systems. If successful, this research will advance understanding of creativity in engineering design, and should also generalize to other design tasks in science and engineering. Problem definition is perhaps the most critical part of design, since it determines the boundaries and topology of the search space and hence determines the originality and quality of designs that can be generated. Hence, this research is critical and timely, with potentially broad impacts. The interactive system should also serve as a useful educational tool that increases creativity in novices. The tool will demonstrate the power of Information Technology is aiding human creativity. The tool will be used in design courses at Arizona State, and will be distributed widely to other universities over the Internet. If successful, this system and the principles that underlie it will change the way that apprentice designers approach their tasks and, in the longer term, lead to more creative engineering practices. Thus, our work will also lead to innovative educational approaches in engineering design that reward creativity. The results will be disseminated through normal academic channels that involve publishing papers and presenting talks at conferences.