CRII: CHS: Knowing and Creating: Implications of Increased Information Availability During the Design Process

University Of Nebraska At Omaha, Omaha NE

Investigators

Abstract

Developing creative products is a key software engineering problem for companies that want to distinguish themselves from similar products in the market. Relatively little is known, however, about how software development teams in the early stages of design use relevant information such as customer behavior and competing products to generate creative ideas for product requirements, nor how different kinds of information might affect their creativity. This project will study how expert software designers engage with design information in the early stages of software development to develop an "Information Archetypes Framework" that characterizes design information and its influence on design creativity. This framework will be validated through studying the performance of student design teams that are given different types of information to support product brainstorming activities. In addition to improving understanding of design creativity and cognition from a research perspective, the project team will conduct collaborative workshops with local software development and startup companies to discuss how to effectively navigate complex information to enhance their competitiveness. The project will also have significant educational impacts through training student researchers, informing the design of innovation-enhancing activities for software engineering students, the development of a broader curriculum on innovation in information technology, and supporting outreach through immersive summer programming workshops aimed at increasing middle school girls' knowledge and interest in STEM and design-related careers. The research component of the project has two main elements. The first aims to expand on an initial version of the Information Archetypes Framework that characterizes the source, abstractness, and generality of information, as well as team styles for problem solving and sharing information. To do this, expert software designers will be asked to attend a design session and given a short design problem along with carefully crafted pieces of information that are relevant to the problem domain and correspond to the dimensions identified in the current version of the framework. The project team will ask each designer to organize the information and explain how they made judgments about the relatedness and potential usefulness of the different pieces of information for design, using a combination of quantitative analysis of the similarity judgments and qualitative analysis of interview responses to revise the framework. The impact of the revised framework on design creativity will then be investigated by developing a similar design problem for an introductory design class in an information technology innovation program, giving each student team a unique set of relevant information corresponding to each type of information identified in the revised framework. The project team will use a protocol analysis of each team's interactions to analyze how these differences in available information affect communicative content and processes, along with an existing framework for measuring the novelty and quality of generated ideas in order to link differences in available information to the teams' design outputs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.