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1. How Should We Measure Creativity in Design Studies? A Comparison of Social Science and Engineering Approaches

   https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2020-22446  

   Miller, Scarlett R.; Hunter, Samuel T.; Starkey, Elizabeth; Ramachandran, Sharath; Ahmed, Faez; Fuge, Mark (August 2020, Proceedings of the ASME 2020 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC/CIE202-)

   null (Ed.)

   Design researchers have long sought to understand the mechanisms that support creative idea development. However, one of the key challenges faced by the design community is how to effectively measure the nebulous construct of creativity. The social science and engineering communities have adopted two vastly different approaches to solving this problem, both of which have been deployed throughout engineering design research. The goal of this paper was to compare and contrast these two approaches using design ratings of nearly 1000 engineering design ideas paired with a qualitative study with expert raters. The results of this study identify that while these two methods provide similar ratings of idea quality, there was a statistically significant negative relationship between these methods for ratings of idea novelty. Qualitative analysis of recordings from expert raters’ think aloud concept mapping points to potential sources of disagreement. In addition, the results show that while quasi-expert and expert raters provided similar ratings of design novelty, there was not significant agreement between these groups for ratings of design quality. The results of this study provide guidance for the deployment of idea ratings in engineering design research and evidence for the development and potential modification of engineering design creativity metrics. 

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2. Work in Progress: Using Neuro-responses to Understand Creativity, the Engineering Design Process, and Concept Generation

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--35701  

   Hartog, Tess; Marshall, Megan; Alhashim, Amin; Ahad, Md Tanvir; Siddique, Zahed (January 2020, Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Investigations of creativity have been an intriguing topic for a long time, but assessing creativity is extremely complex. Creativity is a cornerstone of engineering disciplines, so understanding creativity and how to enhance creative abilities through engineering education has received substantial attention. Fields outside of engineering are no stranger to neuro-investigations of creativity and although some neuro-response studies have been conducted to understand creativity in engineering, these studies need to map the engineering design and concept generation processes better. Using neuroimaging techniques alongside engineering design and concept generation processes is necessary for understanding how to improve creative idea generation and creativity studies in engineering. In this paper, a survey is provided of the literature for the different neurological approaches that have been used to study the engineering design process and creative processes. Also presented are proposed strategies to apply these neurological approaches to engineering design to understand the creative process in greater detail. Furthermore, results from a pilot study investigating neuro-responses of engineers are presented. 

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3. Calibrating Novelty Metrics Using Human Raters: A Case Study

   Ramachandran, S.K.; Ahmed, F.; Fuge, M.; Hunter, S.; Miller, S.R. (January 2019, ASME 2018 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Design Conference)

   One of the key challenges facing the engineering design community is how to effectively measure the nebulous construct of design novelty. The community has adopted two vastly different approaches to solving this problem; a more quantitative approach that relies on feature-trees and a more subjective approach that uses human raters. The goal of this study was to identify a method for using human raters as a means of calibrating feature-tree based novelty metrics in engineering design. This was accomplished through a study where four raters were asked to follow a think-out-loud protocol while they physically created idea maps for 10 design concepts based on the similarity of these concepts. Content analysis was used to identify the relative importance of idea properties that informed judgements of concept similarity. This analysis was then compared to the weights used in traditional feature-tree based novelty methods. These results of this study can be used to calibrate existing metrics against expert ratings to provide justification for the categorizes used in the creation of a feature tree in engineering design research and also justify the weights used in the computation of design novelty. 

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4. Exploring the Development of Engineering Design Creativity and the Role of Spatial Skills in this Process

   Reid, Clodagh; Sorby, Sheryl (September 2023, SEFI Conference Proceedings)

   This study aims to investigate the development of creativity in engineering education and how spatial skills relate to creativity of design solutions. Undergraduate students in the first (n=86) and fourth/fifth year (n=48) of their engineering programme were invited to participate. Students completed four spatial tests to precisely measure visualisation skills. In a separate session, students were invited back to solve two engineering design tasks: a ping pong problem where they designed a ping pong ball launcher game to meet specified criteria and a rain catcher problem where they were tasked with developing as many ideas for capturing rainwater as a water source for a remote location as they could. Students were asked not to consider feasibility, cost, etc. and to come up multiple radical solutions to the rainwater capture problem. The creativity of design solutions was assessed using Adaptive Comparative Judgement. Statistical analysis indicated significant relationships between spatial skills, students’ year of study and gender. A statistically significant relationship was also found between students’ creativity scores on both design challenges. No statistical differences were determined in the creativity of first and fourth/fifth year students’ solutions. These findings will be discussed relative to existing research, future work, and potential implications for education practice. 

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5. Do Creativity Metrics from Design Research Correlate with Those from Psychology?

   https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2024.2320513  

   Gero, John; Milovanovic, Julie (February 2024, Creativity Research Journal)

   processes used in designing and relate them to the metrics used in psychology for idea creativity, ie, novelty and fluency. Our goal was to test the reliability of psychometric measures of creativity to assess creativity in team design. We studied 19 teams of 3 professional engineers that engaged in a one hour-long design task. Design tasks have a greater ecological validity than single repetitive tasks like the AUT and the RAT. Engaging in a design task involves a wide range of cognitive activities, which contribute to creative ideation and to expanding the design space. This study focused on the relationship between the teams’ design idea creativity and design behaviors during the task. We explored to what extent design collaboration between teammates, design evaluation and the co-evolution of the problem-solution space relate to the psychometric measures of idea creativity. Results suggest no specific trend in the correlation between collaboration and idea creativity as measured by the metrics used in psychology, while more cognitive focus on problemsolution co-evolution negatively correlates with these measures of idea creativity. The paper concludes with potential explanations for this lack of correlation. 

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