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Abstract Product dissection is a popular educational tool in engineering design due to its ability to help students understand a product, provide inspiration for new design ideas, and aid in product redesign. While prior research has investigated how dissecting a product before idea generation impacts the creative output of the ideation session, these studies failed to look at the types of ideas generated before dissection or how the type of product dissected impacts this. Thus, the goal of the current study was to examine how product dissection impacts the solution space explored by students. Fifty-five undergraduate engineering students participated in the experiment; 40 participants virtually dissected a product, while the remaining 15 completed a personality test. The results of the study highlight that students explored new types of ideas during the second ideation session for all conditions and at all levels, with students having the biggest increase in embodiment variety when they dissected analogically far products. Overall, there were no differences in design variety between students in the dissection condition and the incubation condition. This study highlights how incubation can impact design variety and calls for further investigation of the interaction between product dissection and incubation.
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Are Creativity and Self-Efficacy at Odds? An Exploration in Variations of Product Dissection in Engineering Education
The purpose of product dissection is to teach students how a product works and provide them with inspiration for new ideas. However, little is known about how variations in dissection activities impact creative outcomes or engineering self-efficacy (ESE) and creative self-efficacies (CSE). This is important since the goal of engineering education is to produce capable and creative engineers. The current study was, thus, developed to address this research gap through a factorial experiment. The results showed that idea development was not impacted by dissection conditions but that ESE and CSE were increased through these activities. The results also showed that higher levels of CSE and ESE had alternate effects on novel idea development indicating they are at odds in engineering education.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1463009
- PAR ID:
- 10128814
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Mechanical Design
- Volume:
- 141
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1050-0472
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4041173
