Abstract
Microfluidics has been an important method in providing answers to a wide variety of research questions in chemistry, biochemistry, and biology. Microfluidic designers benefit from instructional textbooks describing foundational principles and practices in developing microfluidic devices; however, these texts do not offer guidance about how to generate design concepts for microfluidic devices. Research on design in related fields, such as mechanical engineering, documents the difficulties engineers face when attempting to generate novel ideas. For microfluidic device designers, support during idea generation may lead to greater exploration of potential innovations in design. To investigate successful idea generation in microfluidics, we analyzed successful microfluidic US patents, selecting those with the key word “microfluidic” over a 2-year period. After analyzing the features and functions of 235 patents, we identified 36 distinct design strategies in microfluidic devices. We document each strategy, and demonstrate their usefulness in a concept generation study of practitioners in microfluidic design. While some of the identified design strategies may be familiar to microfluidic designers, exposure to this large set of strategies helped participants generate more diverse, creative, and unique microfluidic design concepts, which are considered best practices in idea generation.
Highlights
The development of engineering devices has led to many important discoveries in complex biological systems including synthetic biology (Noireaux and Libchaber 2004; Agresti et al 2010; Caschera et al 2016), mechanobiology (Yang et al 2011; Polacheck et al 2013), single-cell analysis (Wheeler et al 2003; Brouzes et al 2009; Lee et al 2016), and tissue engineering (Yang et al 2001; Ma et al 2005)
34 could be described by one of Design Heuristics (Table 3 in Appendix 2) and 17 were new strategies uncovered in the microfluidics patent data (Table 4 in Appendix 2)
The analysis resulted in identifying 36 non-inherent strategies that are demonstrated in microfluidic patents. 19 of these were previously identified as part of Design Heuristics (Yilmaz et al 2016a) and 17 were new strategies only observed in this study
Summary
The development of engineering devices has led to many important discoveries in complex biological systems including synthetic biology (Noireaux and Libchaber 2004; Agresti et al 2010; Caschera et al 2016), mechanobiology (Yang et al 2011; Polacheck et al 2013), single-cell analysis (Wheeler et al 2003; Brouzes et al 2009; Lee et al 2016), and tissue engineering (Yang et al 2001; Ma et al 2005). As microfluidic practitioners solve problems in varied areas, including medical diagnostics (Tse et al 2013), drug screening (Pihl et al 2005; Dittrich and Manz 2006), and single molecule studies (Dittrich and Manz 2005), they are frequently navigating open-ended design problems. While microfluidic textbooks provide fundamental understandings of physics behind fluid transport and fabrication methods, they do not often describe idea generation approaches to develop potential device concepts.
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