Generating Alternatives: Enhancing Creativity in the Design of Information Systems

这个奖项是根据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，有时难以捉摸。在这个项目中，PI和他的团队将在S信息系统设计硕士课程的背景下，构建和测试一系列旨在促进创新设计的练习，灵感来自于对一般创意过程的思考，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工具来客观地表示设计的准确性、可变性和相似性。将开发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)的探索性游戏，以便为初始设计问题得出更先进和更具创造性的解决方案。第二组将使用鼓励抽象的技术，使学生能够跨域转移设计。第三组将使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。展示和比较设计的工具将变成鼓励产生多样化和新奇设计的工具。由于实验将嵌入到设计课程中，因此练习对学生和研究都有好处。这样一项事业需要一支拥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制作图表、研究、设计和评估教育方法以及设计软件密集型信息系统方面拥有专业知识。该团队的预测和技术基于他们之前的工作，即在课堂环境中发展设计专业知识；该团队已经生产出计算工具，作为拟议研究的基础。广泛的影响：糟糕的设计，以及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。通过他们在实践中的努力和在其他设计师职业生涯中的指导，设计师教育的改进可能会得到放大。虽然有许多方法被推荐用于教学系统设计，但很少有经验性检验的方法。这项研究的新颖之处在于，它将着眼于IT设计的中间产品--拓扑图，以了解创造力的认知过程。在此基础上，PI将构建评估和增加设计创新的方法，这些方法将对其他研究人员和教师有用。具体的影响应该包括改进系统设计教育，从而提高PI和其他设计专业毕业生创建的软件和社会系统的效率，这反过来可能帮助我们改进广泛的人类活动。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.