Development of Support for Assessment of Creativity, Novelty and Requirement Satisfaction in Designing

Abstract

The topic of this research in this thesis is creativity assessment of solutions developed in the engineering design process as a means of aiding designers to focus their creative effort during the process. Both engineering design process and creative process are planned, and occur, together in practice. Engineering design is a complex process involving both problem finding and problem solving, broadly divided into four stages: task clarification, conceptual design, embodiment design and detailed design. Literature on design models, theories and approaches is studied to understand the nature of design models developed in literature and to find the various characteristics of the design process, such as design stages, inputs and outputs of the stages, etc., leading to a detailed understanding of the current models of the design process, and summarised using an extended, integrated model of designing. In particular, a detailed characterization of the design stages is carried out using the extended-integrated model of designing. The method of mapping is used to extract the underlying common constructs in the steps within task clarification, conceptual and embodiment design stages of the design process, so that these can be used in the evaluation of creativity consistently across the design stages. The results of this characterization are discussed and summarized with a focus on creativity assessment methods. It is found from the characterization that requirements and solutions are important constructs of designing. Further, it is found that pairing of requirement and solution is necessary for evaluation of creativity during the design process. It is also found that level of abstraction is important, as requirement-solution pairs belong to various levels of abstraction. The concept of creativity, and major indicators of creativity, are reviewed through a study of literature. Current methods for assessing creativity are also reviewed, and their shortcomings identified. It is found that, novelty and usefulness are the two umbrella indicators of the creativity. However, it is also found that it is not possible to use usefulness during the design process. Therefore, requirement satisfaction is proposed as a proxy indicator for evaluation of usefulness. Using the above, a creativity assessment method is proposed to address the limitations found in the literature. The creativity assessment method is described in detail and an example is used to explain how the method can be applied during the design process. In this example, the application of the method in guiding the effort during the design process is also explained. Further, as to how the method should be able to overcome the limitations of earlier methods is discussed. Evaluation of the method is carried out for its correctness, and partially for its usability and impact. Correctness is evaluated by comparing the assessment using the method with the benchmark – the collective assessment by a group of experienced designers as judges; the comparison showed that the assessment using the creativity assessment method closely matched those of the benchmark. It was also found that assessment of degree of requirement satisfaction (one part of the above creativity assessment method) during the design process led to an improvement in creativity of the designs produced.