1. Concept Generation Chapter 6
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2. Concept Generation in PDP
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3. 6.2 Creativity and Problem Solving
How can creativity help design projects?
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4. Creativity and Problem Solving
Creative thinkers are distinguished by their ability to synthesize new combinations of ideas and concepts into meaningful and useful forms.
A creative engineer is one who produces a lot of useful ideas.
A creative person is adept at breaking a problem-solving task down to take a fresh look at its parts, or in making connections between the current problem and seemingly unrelated observations or facts.
There is the popular myth that creative ideas arrive with flash- like spontaneity.
A characteristic of the creative process is that initially the idea is only imperfectly understood.
Dieter/Schmidt, Engineering Design 5e. ©2013. The McGraw-Hill Companies

5. Supports to Creative Thinking
Develop a creative attitude:
To be creative it is essential to develop confidence that you can provide a creative solution to a problem.
Unlock your imagination:
You must rekindle the vivid imagination you had as a child.
Be persistent:
Creativity often required hard work!
Develop an open mind:
Having an open mind means being receptive to ideas from any and all sources.
Suspend your judgment:
Nothing inhibits the creative process more than critical judgment of an emerging idea.
Set problem boundaries:
We place great emphasis on proper problem definition as a step toward problem solution.
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6. Four-Stage Model of Creative Thinking Process & Problem Solving
Preparation (stage1):
The elements of the problem are examined and their interrelations are studied.
Incubation (stage 2):
You “sleep on the problem”. Sleep disengages your conscious mind, allowing the unconscious mind to work on a problem freely.
Inspiration (stage 3):
A solution or a path toward the solution emerges.
Verification (stage 4):
The inspired solution is checked against the desired result.
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7. Barriers to Creative Thinking
It is important to recognize how mental blocks interfere with creative thinking.
A mental block is a mental wall that prevents the problem solver from correctly perceiving a problem or conceiving its solution.
A mental block is an event that inhibits the successful use of normal cognitive processes to come to a solution.
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8. Types of Mental Blocks Perceptual Blocks: Emotional Blocks:
Have to do with not properly defining the problem and not recognizing the information needed to solve it.
Emotional Blocks:
Obstacles that are concerned with the psychological safety of the individual.
Intellectual Blocks:
They arise from a poor choice of the problem-solving strategy or having inadequate background and knowledge.
Environmental Blocks:
These are blocks that are imposed by the immediate physical or social environment.
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9. Perceptual Blocks Stereotyping: Information overload:
Thinking conventionally or in a formulaic way about an event, person, or way of doing something.
Information overload:
You become so overloaded with minute details that you are unable to sort out the critical aspects of the problem.
“NOT BEING ABLE TO SEE THE FOREST FOR THE TREES!”
Limiting the problem unnecessarily:
Broad statements of the problem help keep the mind open to a wider range of ideas.
Fixation:
People’s thinking can be influenced so greatly by their previous experience or some other bias that they are not able to sufficiently recognize alternative ideas.
Priming or provision of cues:
If the thinking process is started by giving examples or solution cues, it is possible for thinking to stay within the realm of solutions suggested by those initial starting points.
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10. Emotional Blocks Fear of risk taking: Unease with chaos:
This is the feat of proposing an idea that is ultimately found to be faulty.
Unease with chaos:
People in general , and many engineers in particular, are uncomfortable with highly unstructured situations.
Inability or unwillingness to incubate new ideas:
In our busy lives, we often don’t take the time to let ideas lie dormant so they can incubate properly.
Motivation:
People differ considerably in their motivation to seek creative solutions to challenging problems.
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11. Intellectual Blocks
Poor choice of problem-solving language or problem representation:
It is important to make a conscious decision concerning the “language” for your creative problem solving.
Memory block:
Memory holds strategies and tactics for finding solutions as well as solutions themselves.
Insufficient knowledge base:
Generally, ideas are generated from a person’s education and experience.
Incorrect information:
It is obvious that using incorrect information can lead to poor results.
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12. Environmental Blocks Physical environment: Criticism:
This is a very personal factor in its effects on creativity.
Criticism:
Nonsupportive remarks about your ideas can be personally hurtful and harmful to your creativity.
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13. 6.3 Creative Thinking Methods
How can we improve our creativity?
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14. Improving Creativity Improving creativity is a popular endeavor.
A search of Google under Creative Methods yielded over 12 million hits!
The following methods are aimed at improving the following characteristics of the problem solver:
Sensitivity: The ability to recognize that a problem exists.
Fluency: The ability to produce a large number of alternative solutions.
Flexibility: The ability to develop a wide range of approaches to a problem.
Originality: The ability to produce original solutions to a problem.
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15. Brainstorming
Brainstorming is the most common method used by design teams for generating ideas.
The word brainstorming has come into general usage in the language to denote any kind of idea generation.
Brainstorming is a carefully orchestrated process.
A well-done brainstorming session is an enthusiastic session of rapid, free-flowing ideas.
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16. SCAMPER Checklist to Aid in Brainstorming
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17. Refinement and Evaluation of Ideas
The objective of creative idea evaluation is not to winnow down the set of ideas into a single or very small number of solutions.
The primary purpose of the refinement and evaluation step in concept generation is the identification of creative, feasible, yet still practical ideas.
A quick way of sorting ideas:
Ideas that are feasible as they stand.
Ideas that may have potential after more thought or research are applied.
Ideas that are very unfeasible and have no chance of becoming good solutions.
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18. Idea Generating Techniques Beyond Brainstorming
Six Key Questions:
Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?
Five Whys:
Why has the machine stopped?– A fuse blew because the fan overloaded.
Why was there an overload?– Inadequate lubrication for bearings.
Why wasn’t there enough lubrication?– The pump stopped working.
Why wasn’t the pump working?– Pump shaft vibration caused by abrasion wear.
Why was there abrasion? – No filter on lube pump, allowing debris to enter the system
Checklists – are used to help stimulate creative thoughts. (Table 6.3)
Fantasy or Wishful Thinking – entice the mind to think in flight of fancy. Wouldn’t be nice if……? I wish…..?
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19. Schematic Diagram of the Creative Idea Evaluation Process
E. Lumsdaine and M. Lumsdaine, Creative Problem Solving, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1995, p.226.
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20. Synectics: An Inventive Method Based on Analogy
In design, like in everyday life, many problems are solved by analogy.
Synectics (from the Greek work synektiktein, meaning joining together of different things into unified connection) is a methodology or creativity based on reasoning by analogy that was first described in the book of Gordon.
Synectics recognizes four types of analogy:
Direct Analogy
Fantasy Analogy
Personal Analogy
Symbolic Analogy
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21. Biomimetic Design
A particularly intriguing source of direct analogies is those that are inspired by biological systems.
Biomimetic is the mimicking of biological system such as:
The invention of the Velcro fasteners.
The challenge for designers is twofold:
engineering designer are not trained in a wide variety of biological systems
the words engineers use to express behavior do not always match words used to describe biological systems.
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22. Concept Map
A very useful tool for the generation of ideas by association, and for organizing information in preparation for writing a report, is the concept map.
A concept map is good for generating and recording ideas during brainstorming.
The team is asked to locate the main problem at the center of a large sheet of a paper and then:
Write down team-generated thoughts surrounding the central problem label.
Underline or circle them and connect them to the central focus.
Use an arrow to show which issue drives what.
Create new major branches of concepts to represent major subtopics.
If the process develops a secondary or separate map, label it and connect it to the rest of the map.
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23. Concept Map for the Recycling of a Metal
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24. 6.4 Creative Methods for Design
Why do we need creativity for a design task?
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25. Creativity Techniques for a Design
The motivation for applying any creativity technique to a design task is to generate as many ideas as possible.
Quantity counts above quality, and wild ideas are encouraged at the early stages of the design work.
Once an initial pool of concepts for alternative designs exists, these alternatives can be reviewed more critically.
The goal becomes sorting out infeasible ideas.
The team is identifying a smaller subset of ideas that can be developed into practical solutions.
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26. Generating Design Concepts
Systematic methods for generating engineering designs exist.
The task of the designer is to find the best of all possible candidate solutions to a design task.
Generative design is a theoretical construct that creates many feasible alternatives to a given product design specification (PDS).
The set of all possible designs is an n-dimensional hyperspace called a design space.
The key idea to remember in design is that it is beneficial in almost every situation to develop a number of alternative designs that rely on different means to accomplish a desired behavior.
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27. Schematic of an n-dimensional design space
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28. Systematic Methods for Designing
Some design methods are labeled as systematic because they involve a structured process for generating design solutions.
Systematic methods for mechanical, conceptual design generation are:
Functional Decomposition and Synthesis
Morphological Analysis
Theory of Inventive Problem Solving
Axiomatic Design
Design Optimization
Decision-Based Design
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29. 6.5 Functional Decomposition and Synthesis
How does functional decomposition help a design?
Dieter/Schmidt, Engineering Design 5e. ©2013. The McGraw-Hill Companies

30. Functional Decomposition and Synthesis
A common strategy for solving any complex task or describing any complex system is to decompose it into smaller units that are easier to work with.
Decomposing must result in units that meaningfully represent the original entity.
Mechanical design is recursive:
That means the same design process applied to the overall product applies to the units of the product and can be repeated until a successful outcome is achieved.
Functional decomposition method has solution-neutrality:
It does not initially impose a design, allowing more leeway for creativity and generates a wide variety of alternative solutions.
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31. Physical Decomposition
Separating the product directly into its subassemblies and components and accurately describe how all these are joined together to create the behaviour of the product.
Reverse engineering the product can revealed the connectivity information of the subassemblies and components.
Decomposition is a recursive process (a repeating process whose output at each stage is applied as input in the succeeding stage) where the subassembly is decomposed until an individual part that is still essential for the overall function of the product.
Dieter/Schmidt, Engineering Design 5e. ©2013. The McGraw-Hill Companies

32. Steps in Physical Decomposition
Define the total physical system as the root block of a tree diagram.
Identify, define and draw the first level root block of the subassemblies of the system root block.
Identify and draw the physical connections between the subassembly.
Identify and draw the physical connections between the subassembly and any other subassemblies on the same level.
Examine the first subassembly block in the completed level to identify if it can be further decomposed into more than one distinct and significant component or not. If yes, treat as a root block and repeat step 2. If not, then move to check other blocks at the same level.
End the process when there are no more blocks anywhere in the hierarchy level in the tree diagram.
Physical decomposition is a top-down approach and is not solution neutral free as it is based on existing design.
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33. Example for Physical Decomposition of a Bicycle
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34. Physical Decomposition of a Bicycle
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35. Functional Representation: Standard Flow Classes & Member Flow
R. E. Stone, “Functional Basis”, Design Engineering Lab Webpage, designengineeringlab.org/FunctionCAD/FB.htm, accessed November 10, 2011.
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36. Components Abstracted into Function Blocks
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37. Function Structure Black Box for a Basketball Ball Return
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38. Performing Functional Decomposition
Functional decomposition produces a diagram called a function structure.
A function structure is a block diagram depicting flows of energy, material, and signal as labeled arrows taking paths between function blocks.
The most general function structure is a single function block description of a device.
This type of function structure (a single function block) is called a black box representation of a device.
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39. Function Structure for a Mechanical Pencil
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40. Function Structure for a Basketball Return Device
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41. Strengths and Weaknesses of Functional Synthesis
First, creating function structures forces re-representation into a language that is useful for the manipulation for mechanical design problems.
Second, using a function structure to represent a design lends functional labels to potential solution components, and these labels serve as hints for new memory searches.
Weaknesses:
Some products are better suited to representation and design by functional decomposition and synthesis than are others.
The function structure is a flow diagram where flows are connecting different functions performed by the product the structure represents.
Dieter/Schmidt, Engineering Design 5e. ©2013. The McGraw-Hill Companies

42. Morphological Methods
Morphological analysis is a method for representing and exploring all the relationships in multidimensional problems.
The word morphology means the study of shape and form.
Morphological analysis is a way of creating new forms.
Morphological methods have been recorded in science as a way to enumerate and investigate solution alternatives as far back as the 1700s.
Zwicky formalized the process of applying morphological methods to design in the mid-1960s with the publication of a text that was translated into English in 1969.
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43. Morphological Method for Design
The general morphological approach to design is summarized in the following three steps:
Divide the overall design problem into simpler subproblems.
Generate solution concepts for each subproblem.
Systematically combine subproblem solutions into different complete solutions and evaluate all combinations.
Dieter/Schmidt, Engineering Design 5e. ©2013. The McGraw-Hill Companies

44. Morphological Chart for Shot Buddy Basketball Return System
Dieter/Schmidt, Engineering Design 5e. ©2013. The McGraw-Hill Companies

45. Sketch of Shot-Buddy Concept
Adapted from J. Davis, J. Decker, J. Maresco, S. McBee, S. Phillips, and R. Quinn, “JSR Design Final Report: Shot-Buddy,” unpublished, ENME 472, University of Maryland, May 2010.
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