Fresh in My Mind! Investigating the effects of the order of presenting opportunistic and restrictive design for additive manufacturing content on students’ creativity

Abstract

To capitalise the design freedoms enabled by additive manufacturing (AM), designers must employ opportunistic and restrictive design for AM (O- and R-DfAM respectively). The order of information presentation influences the retrieval of said information; however, there is a need to explore this effect within DfAM. We compared four variations in DfAM education: (1) O-DfAM followed by R-DfAM, (2) R-DfAM followed by O-DfAM, (3) only O-DfAM, and (4) only R-DfAM by evaluating: (1) students’ DfAM self-efficacy, (2) their self-reported DfAM use, and (3) design creativity. All students trained in DfAM demonstrated an increase in R-DfAM self-efficacy; however, only students trained in O-DfAM, with or without R-DfAM, reported an increase in O-DfAM self-efficacy. Furthermore, students trained in R-DfAM first followed by O-DfAM generated more creative ideas.

KEYWORDS:

• Design education
• design for additive manufacturing
• creativity

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Dr. Stephanie Cutler for her guidance and advice. We would also like to acknowledge the help of the ME 340 instructors and TAs, and members of the britelab and Made by Design Lab for helping conduct the experiment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. An earlier version of this paper has been published as part of the proceedings of the 2020 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC-CIE) (Prabhu et al. 2020c).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) [grant number CMMI-1712234]. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.