Enhancing Creative Design via Software Tools

• Individuals or groups do not engage in effective and efficient processes of innovative design;
• The necessary skills, talents, and knowledge sources are not brought to bear on the problem; and
• The appropriate level, type, and directionality of motivation are not brought to bear.

Laboratory [3, 10] as well as field research [2, 5] over the last several decades has established the major process difficulties of individuals and groups are mainly due to a limited number of errors and these errors can be avoided or ameliorated by providing appropriate structure.

The appropriate overall structure for innovation has several sub-steps and structure is necessary both to help facilitate the progress through these steps and to help guide the separate sub-steps; distinct guidelines are appropriate for each of these sub-steps [8, 9]. As an example of a common failure in the overall control structure, people typically fail to spend sufficient time in the early stages of design: problem finding and problem formulation [7]. As an example of a common failure during a specific stage of innovative design, people often bring critical judgment into play too early in the idea generation phase of problem solving. As another example, empirical evidence shows that people’s behavior is path-dependent and they are often unwilling to take what appears to be a step that undoes a previous action even if that step is actually necessary for a solution [10].

Regarding the second issue (bringing to bear necessary skills, talents and knowledge sources), while software tools cannot fully substitute for human experts, evidence suggests individuals have a large amount of relevant implicit knowledge they often will not bring to bear on a problem and that providing appropriate strategies [10], knowledge sources [11] or representations [3] can significantly improve an individual’s effectiveness in problem solving and innovation. In controlled laboratory experiments, subjects did significantly better in a temporal design task when they used a spatial representation; yet, very few subjects spontaneously adopted such a representation [3]. The impact of felicitous representations, however, is not confined to laboratory demonstrations. Speech research advancements accelerated greatly when waveforms were largely replaced with speech spectrograms and Feynman diagrams allowed similar breakthroughs in atomic physics. Regarding motivation, it may be often assumed that increased motivation will result in better performance. However, the reality is considerably more complex. The effect of increased motivation interacts with personality, complexity, novelty, and whether the motivation is intrinsic or extrinsic [1].