Dear Balder,
I wonder how many professional designers reading your question will feel like me that a 90 minute test is not appropriate for measuring our creativity.
While I can understand your interest in this exercise, there seem to be some elements which may compromise your outcomes.
In particular, I'm interested to read how you intend to measure the creativity you are intending to observe. You refer to a problem that can be "solved" in the 90 minute period, but you are listing a number of product titles where there could be an infinite number of potential "solutions", with widely ranging implications since your partly unconstrained brief gives no indication of the users, intended sale price, etc.
Any reasonably experienced professional or student product designer will produce a collection of initial concept sketches in that period, but what criteria will you use to measure success?
You might get better results from a much more precisely constrained problem, with a measurable outcome, like the Marshmallow Challenge for example.
http://marshmallowchallenge.com/TED_Talk.html
Regards
David Balkwill
Course Leader and Senior Lecturer Product Design
Manchester Metropolitan University
School of Engineering
John Dalton Building,
Chester Street,
Manchester M1 5GD
Telephone 0161 247 6243
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-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Balder Onarheim
Sent: 21 January 2011 02:18
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Short (product) design task for study on creativity
Dear list,
I'm writing a PhD about the relationship between creativity and
constraints (any references on that topic is of course highly
appreciated!), and I'm now in the phase of developing pilot studies
with students and professional designers.
In the study I'll have teams of two designers working 90 minutes with
producing a design solution for a given (product) design problem. The
challenging part is to find a good design task that is possible to
"solve" in about an hour, without giving too many constraints, and
that most people will have relevant background knowledge to work with.
I've considered classical experimental tasks like the measure cup for
blind users, bike rack, device for mounting backpack on bike,
automated cloak-room and spill proof cup, but if anyone on this list
have experiences with using other tasks please let me know!
Thanks a lot,
Balder Onarheim
//////////////////////////////////////
Industrial Designer
PhD Fellow
www.onarheim.com
Copenhagen Business School
Department of Marketing
Solbjerg Plads 3C, 3rd floor
DK-2000 Frederiksberg C
[log in to unmask]
+45 50 373 555
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