CRII: CHS: Knowing and Creating: Implications of Increased Information Availability During the Design Process

开发创新产品是一个关键的软件工程问题的公司，希望从市场上的同类产品中脱颖而出。 然而，对于软件开发团队在设计的早期阶段如何使用相关信息（如客户行为和竞争产品）来为产品需求产生创造性想法，以及不同类型的信息如何影响他们的创造力，我们知之甚少。本项目将研究专家软件设计师如何在软件开发的早期阶段参与设计信息，以开发一个“信息原型框架”，描述设计信息及其对设计创意的影响。 这个框架将通过研究学生设计团队的表现进行验证，这些团队被给予不同类型的信息来支持产品头脑风暴活动。 除了从研究的角度提高对设计创意和认知的理解外，项目团队还将与当地软件开发和创业公司开展合作研讨会，讨论如何有效地驾驭复杂的信息，以提高他们的竞争力。 该项目还将通过培训学生研究人员，为软件工程学生设计创新增强活动提供信息，开发更广泛的信息技术创新课程，并通过沉浸式暑期编程研讨会支持外展，旨在增加中学女生对STEM和设计的知识和兴趣-该项目的研究部分有两个主要内容。 第一个目的是扩大信息原型框架的初始版本，其特征的来源，抽象性和信息的一般性，以及解决问题和共享信息的团队风格。 要做到这一点，专家软件设计师将被要求参加一个设计会议，并给出一个简短的设计问题，沿着精心制作的信息，这些信息与问题域相关，并对应于当前版本框架中确定的维度。 项目团队将要求每个设计师组织信息，并解释他们如何判断不同信息的相关性和潜在有用性，使用相似性判断的定量分析和访谈响应的定性分析相结合来修改框架。 修订后的框架对设计创意的影响，然后将通过开发一个类似的设计问题，在信息技术创新计划的介绍设计类，给每个学生团队一个独特的一组相关的信息，对应于每种类型的信息，在修订后的框架。 项目团队将使用每个团队互动的协议分析来分析这些可用信息的差异如何影响沟通内容和过程，沿着现有的框架，用于衡量所产生的想法的新奇和质量，以便将可用信息的差异与团队的设计输出联系起来。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的学术价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

Developing creative products is a key software engineering problem for companies that want to distinguish themselves from similar products in the market. Relatively little is known, however, about how software development teams in the early stages of design use relevant information such as customer behavior and competing products to generate creative ideas for product requirements, nor how different kinds of information might affect their creativity. This project will study how expert software designers engage with design information in the early stages of software development to develop an "Information Archetypes Framework" that characterizes design information and its influence on design creativity. This framework will be validated through studying the performance of student design teams that are given different types of information to support product brainstorming activities. In addition to improving understanding of design creativity and cognition from a research perspective, the project team will conduct collaborative workshops with local software development and startup companies to discuss how to effectively navigate complex information to enhance their competitiveness. The project will also have significant educational impacts through training student researchers, informing the design of innovation-enhancing activities for software engineering students, the development of a broader curriculum on innovation in information technology, and supporting outreach through immersive summer programming workshops aimed at increasing middle school girls' knowledge and interest in STEM and design-related careers.The research component of the project has two main elements. The first aims to expand on an initial version of the Information Archetypes Framework that characterizes the source, abstractness, and generality of information, as well as team styles for problem solving and sharing information. To do this, expert software designers will be asked to attend a design session and given a short design problem along with carefully crafted pieces of information that are relevant to the problem domain and correspond to the dimensions identified in the current version of the framework. The project team will ask each designer to organize the information and explain how they made judgments about the relatedness and potential usefulness of the different pieces of information for design, using a combination of quantitative analysis of the similarity judgments and qualitative analysis of interview responses to revise the framework. The impact of the revised framework on design creativity will then be investigated by developing a similar design problem for an introductory design class in an information technology innovation program, giving each student team a unique set of relevant information corresponding to each type of information identified in the revised framework. The project team will use a protocol analysis of each team's interactions to analyze how these differences in available information affect communicative content and processes, along with an existing framework for measuring the novelty and quality of generated ideas in order to link differences in available information to the teams' design outputs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.