Resumen de Innovation skills for tomorrow’s sustainable designers
Julie Linsey, Vimal Viswanathan
Tomorrow’s sustainable designers will need an arsenal of tools for innovation. An approach for teaching design methods and innovationis described. A new approach for teaching design methods based on the use of analogous products to provide concrete experiences priorto the method’s application to a novel design problem was evaluated. Students’ opinions of the various design methods and theirperceptions of the class’s influence on their creativity were also measured. Past experiments have shown that the presentation ofexample solutions has the potential to cause design fixation thus limiting the design solutions considered. Due to this, the teams’ finalproof-of-concept models were compared with their initial analogous products to measure degree of design fixation. Results show thatthe use of analogous products early in the class’s design process does not appear to cause design fixation but the students would preferto have standardized products to learn the methods with. The design methods taught in class may assist in overcoming the designfixation introduced by the analogous products or it may be that since the analogous products were cross-domain analogies they mayhave induced less design fixation. The course which included sustainable design projects was highly successful in influencing students’creativity. Students’ clearly felt they were better at generating ideas and that the course had improved their innovation skills.
