Influences of design tools on the original and redesign processes

Abstract

Concept generation plays a vital role in establishing a broader foundation in the design process to create novel products. In the globalized, collaborative, designing scenario, an unambiguous representation of captured ideas to explicate a designer's thoughts is important in the sharing and reuse of concepts. Various design studies have noted the impact of design tools on concept generation. However, the results did not detail the influences of a variety of tools on the representation and reinterpretation of concepts through captured design documents. The goal of this paper was to understand the influence of conceptual design tools: Hi-Tech^®Mobile e-Notes Taker^TM, Wacom^® Tablet, and Rhinoceros^® CAD with MS Word/PowerPoint on concept representation and reinterpretation, during the original and redesign phases. Eighteen design experiments, involving six individual student designers' solving three design problems each, were conducted in the original and redesign phases. The analyses of 26 variables from captured documents and video protocols reveal that the design tools had a statistically significant impact on four key variables: the total time taken to solve each problem, the time spent on detailed design activity, the textual representation of structural requirements, and the graphical representation of the structure of detailed concepts. Irrespective of the design tool used, novice designers generated a low number of redesign concepts. This makes us conclude that designers might require training for reinterpretation and extracting necessary information from the concepts originally captured, rather than working with poor understanding, ambiguity, and assumptions about the original designer's intent.

Keywords::

• concept generation
• design tools
• representation
• reinterpretation

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Robert McNeel & Associates, Hi-Tech Solutions, and Wacom companies for allowing us to use the picture of Rhinoceros^® software, Mobile e-Notes Taker^TM, and Wacom^® Tablet, respectively, in this paper. We express our gratitude to all the designers who participated in the conducted design experiments. We acknowledge the assistance of Mr Chandra Mouli Sugavanam and Mr Hari Prakash Ramesh for coding scheme validation and proofreading this paper.

Notes

^1. Email: [email protected]

^2. Email: [email protected]

^3. Email: [email protected]

All the experiments analysed and discussed in this paper were conducted in Innovation Design Study and Sustainability Laboratory, Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.