Engineering designers often generate multiple concepts to increase novelty and diversity among early solution candidates. Many past studies have focused on creating new concepts "from scratch;" however, designers at every level become fixated on their initial designs and struggle to generate different ideas. In line with prior work on…

Numerous studies have shown the value of introducing cognitive supports to encourage the development of creative ability, and researchers have developed a variety of methods to aid in generating ideas. However, design students often struggle to explore more ideas after their initial ideas are exhausted. In this study, an empirically validated tool…

In this paper we examine a case study of a pedagogical strategy that focuses on the teaching of modeling as a habit of mind and practice for novice designers engaged in engineering design challenges. In an engineering design course, pre-service teachers created modeling artifacts in the form of conceptual models, graphical models, mathematical…

Design thinking can be a powerful way to engage the world, allowing interactive understandings that are both analytic and experiential. When fully functioning, design thinking necessarily calls upon faculties often considered a-rational, a-causal and a-logical. Unfortunately, such faculties often give rise to academic suspicion. That is to say,…

Novice designers produced a sequence of sketches while inventing a logo for a novel brand of soft drink. The sketches were scored for the presence of specific objects, their local features and global composition. Self-assessment scores for each sketch and art critics' scores for the end products were collected. It was investigated whether the…