CAREER: Synthesizing Neuroimaging and Data Driven Approaches to Discover Inspirational Examples in Design

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).The goals of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project are: (1) to understand the behaviors and cognition that enable engineering designers to find and utilize inspiring examples in their technical work; and (2) to use this knowledge to develop new data-driven tools to assist in the process of automated inspiration discovery. Designers across industries, ranging from engineering to architecture and animation, increasingly utilize intelligent tools to find inspirational examples. Such tools can track designers’ real-time progress and use this information to predict and return inspiring examples to the designer. Critical to our nation’s competitive advantage, such examples enable designers to ultimately develop more creative and higher quality solutions (e.g., geometric styling that is more attractive to users, analogous systems that improve functional performance). This project will develop a novel computational design tool that recognizes free-form engineering sketches, text descriptions, and 3D models and uses these inputs to infer the ideas and intentions of a designer; in turn, the tool will return examples that are predicted to be inspiring to the designer. An initial version of this tool will be created and used in behavioral and neuroimaging studies with student and professional designers, in which participants will solve real engineering design challenges. Behavioral and neuroimaging data will be used to answer fundamental questions about which types of inspirational examples are most helpful and why. In addition to the primary research activities, an integrated education and outreach plan will increase the number of underrepresented students in STEM through the expansion of a 10-week summer research program for undergraduate students, and through a learning module for middle school students. The project will produce assessments of the outreach activities, as well as deployable models for other institutions to implement similar programs.The research objective of this CAREER project is to demonstrate the combined efficacy of neuroimaging and data-driven techniques to advance the science of 'design via inspiration', enabling designers to use new computational tools in order to discover impactful inspirational stimuli that enhance their creativity and design outcomes. The specific aims of the project are to: (1) characterize brain activation patterns using functional magnetic resonance imaging relating to different representations of design concepts; (2) understand designer behavior during the discovery and application of inspirational stimuli; and (3) develop new, data-driven design tools that support the discovery of inspirational stimuli across a range of interaction modalities (e.g., text descriptions, sketching, 3D models). Research studies will recruit student and professional designers engaged in representative early-stage design ideation tasks in the domain of mechanical engineering. The education and outreach goals of this project are centered on the expansion of a 10-week summer program developed by the PI for underrepresented undergraduate students. The project will create new pedagogical content, assessment methods, and add engagement with a local charter school. Results from the education and outreach work will be packaged and disseminated to the broader community in order to encourage the adoption of similar program models by other institutions.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.