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Psychological safety has been shown to be a consistent, generalizable, and multilevel predictor of outcomes in performance and learning across fields. While work in this field has suggested that psychological safety can impact the creative process, particularly in the generation of ideas and in the discussions surrounding idea development, there has been limited investigations of psychological safety in the engineering domain. Without this knowledge we do not know when to fostering psychological safety in a team environment is most important. This study provides the first attempt at answering this question through an empirical study with 53 engineering design student teams over the course of a 4- and 8-week design project. Specifically, we sought to identify the role of psychological safety on the number and quality (judged by goodness) of ideas generated. In addition, we explored the role of psychological safety on ownership bias and goodness in the concept screening process. The results of the study identified that while psychological safety was not related to the number of ideas a team developed, it was positively related to the quality (goodness) of the ideas developed. In addition, while no relationship was found between psychological safety and ownership bias during concept screening, the results showed that teams with high psychological safety selected a higher percentage of their team members ideas.
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Does It Translate? A Case Study of Conceptual Design Outcomes With U.S. and Moroccan Students
High globalization in the world today results in the involvement of multi-discipline, multi-cultural teams, as well as the entrance of more economic powers in the market. Effective innovation strategies are critical if emerging markets plan to become economic players in this increasingly connected global market. The current work compares the design processes of designers from emerging and established markets to understand how design methods are applied across culture. Specifically, the design decisions of designers from Morocco, one of the four leading economic power in Africa, and the U.S. are investigated. Concept generation and selection are the focus of the current study as they are critical steps in the design process that can determine project outcomes. Previous studies have identified three factors, ownership bias, gender, and idea goodness as influential during concept selection. The effect of these three factors on designers in the United States is well established. The current study expands upon previous findings to examine the influence of these factors across two cultures — U.S. and Morocco. The results of this study, although preliminary, found that U.S. students had a higher idea fluency than Morocco students. It also found a significant difference in idea fluency between genders in the U.S. but not in Morocco. In addition, it was found that overall, participants exhibited ownership bias toward ideas with high goodness.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1351493
- PAR ID:
- 10209532
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASME 2020 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract While psychological safety is a consistent, generalizable, and multilevel predictor of outcomes in team performance across fields that can positively impact the creative process, there have been limited investigations of psychological safety in the engineering domain. Without this knowledge, we do not know whether fostering psychological safety in a team environment is important for specific engineering design outputs from concept generation and screening practices. This study provides one of the first attempts at addressing this research gap through an empirical study with 69 engineering design student teams over the course of 4- and 8-week design projects. Specifically, we sought to identify the role of psychological safety on the number and quality (judged by goodness) of ideas generated. In addition, we explored the role of psychological safety on ownership bias and goodness in the concept screening process. The results of the study identified that while psychological safety was negatively related to the number of ideas a team developed, it was positively related to the quality (goodness) of the ideas developed. This result indicates that while psychological safety may not increase team productivity in terms of the number of ideas produced, it may impact team effectiveness in coming up with viable candidate ideas to move forward in the design process. In addition, there was no relationship between psychological safety and ownership bias during concept screening. These findings provide quantitative evidence on the role of psychological safety on engineering team idea production and identify areas for further study.more » « less
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Ideation is a key phase in engineering design and brainstorming is an established method for ideation. A limitation of the brainstorming process is idea production tends to peak at the beginning and quickly decreases with time. In this exploratory study, we tested an innovative technique to sustain ideation by providing designers feedback about their neurocognition. We used a neuroimaging technique (fNIRS) to monitor students’ neurocognitive activations during a brainstorming task. Half received real-time feedback about their neurocognitive activation in their prefrontal cortex, a brain region associated with working memory and cognitive flexibility. Students who received the neurocognitive feedback maintained higher cortical activation and longer sustained peak activation. Students receiving the neurocognitive feedback demonstrated a higher percentage of right-hemispheric dominance, a region associated to creative processing, compared to the students without neurocognitive feedback. The increase in right-hemispheric dominance positively correlated with an increase in the number of solutions during concept generation and a higher design idea fluency. These results demonstrate the prospective use of neurocognitive feedback to sustain the cognitive activations necessary for idea generation during brainstorming. Future research should explore the effect of neurocognitive feedback with a more robust sample of designers and compare neurocognitive feedback with other types of interventions to sustain ideation.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Abstract The capabilities of additive manufacturing (AM) open up designers’ solution space and enable them to build designs previously impossible through traditional manufacturing (TM). To leverage this design freedom, designers must emphasize opportunistic design for AM (DfAM), i.e., design techniques that leverage AM capabilities. Additionally, designers must also emphasize restrictive DfAM, i.e., design considerations that account for AM limitations, to ensure that their designs can be successfully built. Therefore, designers must adopt a “dual” design mindset—emphasizing both, opportunistic and restrictive DfAM—when designing for AM. However, to leverage AM capabilities, designers must not only generate creative ideas for AM but also select these creative ideas during the concept selection stage. Design educators must specifically emphasize selecting creative ideas in DfAM, as ideas perceived as infeasible through the traditional design for manufacturing lens may now be feasible with AM. This emphasis could prevent creative but feasible ideas from being discarded due to their perceived infeasibility. While several studies have discussed the role of DfAM in encouraging creative idea generation, there is a need to investigate concept selection in DfAM. In this paper, we investigated the effects of four variations in DfAM education: (1) restrictive, (2) opportunistic, (3) restrictive followed by opportunistic (R-O), and (4) opportunistic followed by restrictive (O-R), on students’ concept selection process. We compared the creativity of the concepts generated by students to the creativity of the concepts they selected. The creativity of designs was measured on four dimensions: (1) uniqueness, (2) usefulness, (3) technical goodness, and (4) overall creativity. We also performed qualitative analyses to gain insight into the rationale provided by students when making their design decisions. From the results, we see that only teams from the restrictive and dual O-R groups selected ideas of higher uniqueness and overall creativity. In contrast, teams from the dual R-O DfAM group selected ideas of lower uniqueness compared with the mean uniqueness of ideas generated. Finally, we see that students trained in opportunistic DfAM emphasized minimizing build material the most, whereas those trained only in restrictive DfAM emphasized minimizing build time. These results highlight the need for DfAM education to encourage AM designers to not just generate creative ideas but also have the courage to select them for the next stage of design.more » « less
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During design, different forms of reasoning shape the designers’ decision-making. As a result, the ability to fluently transition across various forms of reasoning is essential. The purpose of this study is two-fold: first is to introduce and explain the concept of Semantic Fluency in Design Reasoning, as the ability to transition across multiple forms of reasoning fluently. To identify these transitions, this study used the Design Reasoning Quadrants framework, which represents four quadrants: experiential observations (reasoning based on observations and experiences), trade-offs (reasoning recognizing multiple competing design requirements), first-principles (reasoning requiring disciplinary understandings), and complex abstractions (reasoning in envisioning new situations). The second purpose of this study is to illustrate semantic fluency in a design review conversation. We selected and presented three different forms of transitions identified through our analysis of conversations between students and design reviewers. Our analysis revealed evidence of semantic fluency in young designers. Mike, one of the students, demonstrated fluency across three quadrants (experiential observations, trade-offs, and first-principles). Lisa and David demonstrated two-quadrant transitions. Lisa had fluency from experiential observations to trade-offs, and David transitioned from experiential observations to first-principles. We recommend the intentional use of design reviews to elicit student reasoning in design and adopt questioning strategies to promote fluency across different forms of design reasoning.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2020-22623
