AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON THE EFFECTS OF ECF CYCLE IN DESIGN CONCEPT GENERATION PROCESS

A-DEWS 2016 - Innovation of Life in Asia - Asian Design Engineering Workshop

Year: 2016
Editor: Umeda, Y.; Nomaguchi, Y.; Koga, T.; Kishita, Y.
Author: Kawahara, Takahiro; Nakagiri, Taku; Nomaguchi, Yutaka; Fujita, Kikuo
Institution: Osaka University, Japan
Section: Conceptual Design
Page(s): 050-059

Abstract

Design concept generation is an important task for producing innovative products. Many methods have been proposed for supporting design concept generation, such as variations of brainstorming, theory of inventive problem solving called TRIZ, and so on. In general, one of research issues for design concept generation method is the verification of their effects. This paper fist proposes ECF cycle: a model of designer’s thinking process in concept generation and its support method. ECF cycle consists of a cyclic process of three steps, i.e., externalization of ideas, classification of them, finding void which means a potential of unnoticed idea. Each of the three steps is supported by TRIZ, functional ontology and a void matrix, respectively.. This paper proposes a method of experimental study to evaluate which step is the most effective in ECF cycle.. Three metrics are used to evaluate the experiment: quantity, variety, and quality. The experiment results show that the combination of classification step and finding void step can support designers to generate ideas most.

Keywords: Conceptual design, Idea generation, Empirical study, Sketch, Classification, Void, TRIZ