Abstract
Generating a range of concepts is often a significant challenge for novice designers given their limited design experience and domain knowledge. This article develops a tool to support novice designers in formulating a design strategy for converting existing artifacts or mechanical objects into abstract representations. The app-based tool is aimed at supporting novice designers in (1) archiving existing artifacts, (2) converting artifacts into abstract representations for divergent activities, and (3) observing the kinematic movements of three-dimensional mechanical objects through augmented reality. An experiment conducted in 2014 investigated how the tool’s augmented reality function and the proposed strategy supported novice designers. A total of 13 second-year industrial design students generated 88 separate ideas. From 12 possible mechanical movements, four participants generated between 11 and 22 ideas each, while another five participants generated 1 or 2 ideas each. Each participant successfully proposed a concept that adapted the selected mechanism in response to a given problem in a given environment. Comparing pre- and posttest scores of each participant, 11 of 13 participants improved their knowledge of kinematic mechanisms. The results suggested that the use of the proposed tool and strategy has potential to help some novice designers explore new concepts and acquire related design knowledge.
Highlights
Conceptual design is a process of exploring promising concepts and involves concept generation, a divergent activity used to derive possible physical concepts, and concept evaluation, a convergent activity to evaluate these concepts.[1,2,3] Divergent activity is seen as an improvement over sticking to an existing concept.[4]
We investigate whether the tool allows novice designers to effectively explore new design concepts while enhancing learning outcomes
This article investigates how novice designers would benefit from the proposed approach, given the constraints imposed by their limited domain knowledge and lack of relevant design experience
Summary
Conceptual design is a process of exploring promising concepts (e.g. sketches) and involves concept generation, a divergent activity used to derive possible physical concepts, and concept evaluation, a convergent activity to evaluate these concepts.[1,2,3] Divergent activity is seen as an improvement over sticking to an existing concept.[4] this presents a fundamental challenge to novice designers as their domain knowledge is too limited to broadly explore possible alternatives.[5]. This article develops a tool and a novel design strategy. Four levels of design representation have been developed, that is, physical, generic physical, spatial, and topological solutions.[4,6] Based on our previous approach, solutions at such physical levels can be converted into multiple abstraction levels. The strategy and the developed tool were assessed through a trial with 13 novice designers. Improvement was assessed based on the number and quality of concepts developed from the concept generation process, along with pre- and posttests
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