Exploring Students' Product Design Concept Generation and Development Practices

摘要

Engineers are challenged with addressing open-ended design problems; successful innovation often hinges on the generation of creative concepts during early stage ideation and the ability to iterate on those concepts to develop final designs. To explore students' approaches to concept generation and development, we conducted a multiple phase think-aloud and interview study to uncover current student practices and explore the impact of a specific instructional approach—learning blocks, which combine online learning with one-on-one coaching sessions to provide feedback to students—on students' ability to incorporate best practices in their idea generation and development approaches. In this paper, we describe the practices of three student participants to provide in-depth understanding of students with different educational levels. These three participants demonstrated a range of approaches to idea generation and development in their pre-instructional sessions, such as generating a limited number of ideas and searching for existing ideas. After completing the learning blocks, all students showed progress, including minimizing evaluating their initial ideas, which led to an increase of ideas generated and developed. Furthermore, students were equipped with ideation techniques that helped them explore the solution space and come up with ideas in a systematic manner. This study reveals challenges students have in idea generation and development and the impact that instruction can have on their incorporation of best practices.