What affects design outcomes of conceptual design? Online publication date: Sat, 31-Jan-2015
by Prabir Sarkar; Amaresh Chakrabarti
International Journal of Design Engineering (IJDE), Vol. 5, No. 4, 2014
Abstract: Research has shown that during conceptual design, designers continuously search for potential design outcomes, consisting of problems, solutions, and evaluation criteria, in different design spaces. Both quality and quantity of these design outcomes are affected by various factors, such as, design method used, participating designers' ability, and design problems used. In this work, using the understanding of search of design spaces, we develop methods for assessing the effects of several factors, such as, individual ability, creativity method used, and problems solved, on the quality and quantity of design outcomes. We use design experiments to empirically identify the effects of these factors on the design outcomes. We observe that compared to ability of the participating designers and problem used, design methods strongly influence the design outcomes. Additionally, it is possible to predict the influences of designers on the design outcomes by understanding solution-generating profiles of designers in other experiments.
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