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Hi Simon, If I understand you right, there is a fair amount of material in this area in the engineering design literature. A starting point is an early design research text by Michael French "Conceptual Design for Engineers" published by Springer in the early 1970s and later by Design Council around 1985. Similar themes, though a little more abstract, are found in journals such as Research in Engineering Design. Best wishes, Terry -----Original Message----- From: Simon Clatworthy [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Wednesday, 22 March 2006 3:16 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Creative concept development Dear All I am working with 3rd Year Industrial Design students on creativity methods in the design process. We are particularly focussing upon the design of service experiences, but new product development is not excluded. I am looking for methods and assistance to help students with the development of concepts. The early stages of product and service development are well described, so are the later phases, yet the concept phase is elusive. Concepts are clearly different from ideas. But how? How can students explore the solution space for concepts? How do ideas suddenly merge to become concepts and are there methods to assist this? How can concepts be structured and filtered? How do we evaluate concepts? Generally I see that students are good at generating masses of ideas. They are also good at visualising concepts, but they are messy when it comes to explaining the process of moving from one to the other. My industrial experience also shows that this is a messy and 'magic' process. Even large design consultancies admit to hiding this from clients because of its messy and highly subjective basis. Can anybody recommend some literature that can help students structure the concept phase of service and product development? Im happy if the literature also concludes that the process is messy, individual and based upon experience and gut feeling. However, a process stage that defines about 80% of project costs must have been thoroughly studied by someone? Regards SimonC Simon Clatworthy Professor of Interaction Design Institute for Design Tel: +47 22 99 71 41 Mob: +47 911 42 337