Innovations in 2011

Popular Science came out with their list of products again. What all creativity can do! One of my favorites is the inverted chain saw - clever! The designers that came up with this concept really had to restructure the problem and let go of the traditional chainsaw concept.

In past work we have shown that innovative products tend to possess certain characteristics and that the competition is unable to catch the innovators even after a few years in the market. Specifically, innovative products tend to hit on average three of the 13 innovation characteristics when compared to the competition. Below is a table with three past PopSci award winning products analyzed against these characteristics.


The chain saw above, by the way hits modified physical layout (chain on the inside), modified physical demands (no exposed chain, less kickback), and additional function (gripping branch while sawing).

Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)

Here's an interesting article from the New York Times. Some excerpts:

Politicians and educators have been wringing their hands for years over test scores showing American students falling behind their counterparts in Slovenia and Singapore. How will the United States stack up against global rivals in innovation?

...it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree.

Please find the whole article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html?src=me&ref=general

No creativity in engineering education

I just came across an interesting study from 2007 that every engineering professor should read:

(Kazerounian, K. & Foley, S. "Barriers to Creativity in Engineering Education: A Study of Instructors and Students Perceptions" ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, Vol 129, July 2007, available at http://www.mcrit.com/enginycat/XF/RTK/barriers.pdf)

In their study, Kazerounian and Foley identify 10 "Maxims of Creativity in Education":

1. Keep an Open Mind

2. Ambiguity is Good

3. Iterative Process that Includes Idea Incubation

4. Reward for Creativity

5. Lead by Example

6. Learning to Fail

7. Encouraging Risk

8. Search for Multiple Answers

9. Internal Motivation

10. Ownership of Learning

They then investigate both student and instructor perspectives on these 10 maxims and their value and presence in education in engineering, sciences and humanities. They find engineering only has maxim 10 "Ownership of Learning" - one out of ten!

As an engineering professor, I am both stunned and not surprised. I am stunned since all 10 are such basics of learning of anything, not just creativity. But I am also not surprised, having seen how and what we (all engineering professors, not just us in our department) teach our students and especially what we test them on.

Interestingly the study also finds that both professors and students value creativity but do not see it in each other. The lack of creativity seems to stem from deep and we have a long road ahead of us!

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? - NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all%3Fsrc%3Dtp&smid=fb-share

A long report, but quite interesting.

“Duckworth’s early research showed that measures of self-control can be a more reliable predictor of students’ grade-point averages than their I.Q.’s. But while self-control seemed to be a critical ingredient in attaining basic success, Duckworth came to feel it wasn’t as relevant when it came to outstanding achievement. People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit.”

She developed a test to measure grit, which she called the Grit Scale. It is a deceptively simple test, in that it requires you to rate yourself on just 12 questions, from “I finish whatever I begin” to “I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one.” It takes about three minutes to complete, and it relies entirely on self-report — and yet when Duckworth took it out into the field, she found it was remarkably predictive of success. At Penn, high grit ratings allowed students with relatively low college-board scores to nonetheless achieve high G.P.A.’s. Duckworth and her collaborators gave their grit test to more than 1,200 freshman cadets as they entered West Point and embarked on the grueling summer training course known as Beast Barracks. The military has developed its own complex evaluation, called the Whole Candidate Score, to judge incoming cadets and predict which of them will survive the demands of West Point; it includes academic grades, a gauge of physical fitness and a Leadership Potential Score. But at the end of Beast Barracks, the more accurate predictor of which cadets persisted and which ones dropped out turned out to be Duckworth’s 12-item grit questionnaire.”

I found “Duckworth’s 12-item grit questionnaire.” I wonder if this might have any correlation to creativity or innovation?

Report from CogSci part 2

During the conference, we had a lot of discussion about the results of the "full crit" sessions having no effect on innovation. When pondering this fact I thought of several things that I observed during the "full crit" sessions.

One being that whenever the subjects were confronted with a series of questions that asked them to critically evaluate the quality of their project, faces reddened and defenses went up. Many of the subjects were quick to defend rather than to reflect, with a "there is nothing wrong with my idea" kind of attitude.

I thought of how we might ask questions differently so that the subjects didn't feel threatened or criticized. The goal of the crit is to give the subjects an opportunity to self-reflect so that they can broaden their ideas, and develop better ideas.

I thought of how we might have to warn them more clearly and even more explicitly that some form of "critique" was going to happen so that they didn't feel surprised by the questions thus making them defensive. The other alternative was my behavior in the process: I thought about what kind of verbiage I may have used, or what my own body language may have been to provoke such a response.

A critique works when there is trust, when there is an openness to sharing ideas, when there is self-reflection, and when change and development of ideas are rewarded. A critique works when the participants know what is going to be talked about and when it is going to happen so that they feel prepared for what might be coming: an awareness and "bracing" themselves for an outcome that is unpredictable. There is nothing like a surprise critic to have people bristle with fear.

Having worked with a lot of design students for whom critiques are a daily meal, this level of defensiveness throughout many of the subjects in our sessions were notable.

At the conference a participant came to our poster session and asked about our research. I shared the outline of what we were trying to do and the results that we have found so far. (Full crits are not working as expected.)

This participant laughed and said that they were not surprised as they knew several mechanical engineers intimately, who, in their opinion, were quite defensive people. The participant couldn't see how the subjects would handle "criticism" well and had been very curious as to the outcome of our current study when they read about it and said that they were not surprised by our current results.

Crits are hard. Some environments are nurturing so that criticism is not accompanied by shame or fear. Some environments are not nurturing but because critiques are a part of how one communicates, there is no choice but to participate in the crits one way or another.

I would like to break down the process of crit from creating an environment, to the consent of the participants, all the way down to the actual items to be discussed and see how we can effectively bring the idea of critiques to the innovative process

Report from CogSci 11

Our team recently attended the 2011 Cognitive Science Society conference, held from July 20-23 in Boston. We presented our poster on Thursday night. In the picture below, Yoon Soo makes a point about our work to a conference attendee while Trina listens attentively.

Here is Katja with our poster:

Over the course of the conference, we learned about several lines of cognitive science research that are relevant to our work. Here are some highlights:

-Kapur & Bielaczyc found that letting students engage in productive failure led to greater learning gains than direct instruction or extended study and evaluation (similar results were found by Roll, Aleven, & Koedinger; both presentations were in the Education in Formal Setting session). In the productive failure paradigm, students are given some sort of problem (in their research, determining consistency in sports performance given a set of data) and have to generate their own methods to solve this problem. Often, the methods that students develop fail, but students learn from this failure. I think that Kapur & Bielaczyc's work relates well to our own manipulation of prototyping in engineering design. As shown in our CogSci paper (see previous post), prototyping early in the design process leads to less design fixation. Prototyping can be a form of productive failure because it shows students what types of ideas work and do not work, just as generating your own methods to solve a math problem will also result in knowledge about what works and what doesn't.

-Ueda & Washida examined the role of two factors in generating innovative ideas: information diffusion from others, or the individual adoption of particular technologies. They asked participants to generate ideas about digital SLR cameras and the Nintendo Wii. Participants included product innovators and early adopters of the products. Participants' ideas were rated for creativity, originality, and feasibility. There was no difference among participants for the Wii ideas, but a group of early adopters who were given information from innovators came up with the most creative ideas for the camera. Ueda & Washida suggest that innovation can be spurred by the diffusion of information, at least among users. I think this is a somewhat surprising result given what we know about design fixation in engineering: providing individuals with design examples makes them fixate and not come up with creative ideas. It is important to note, however, that the authors used their own scales for creativity, originality, and feasibility instead of any published scales (such as those from Shah).

Overall, we learned a lot at CogSci and look forward to attending the conference again in the future!

Could not getting feedback on design be more helpful than getting feedback?

Could it be that if one received no feedback for a design, the final design could be better than if the designer had received feedback? Can feedback simply "validate" the current idea and not prompt improvements?

The study in short (more details in our paper "The Effect of Prototyping and Critical Feedback on Fixation in Engineering Design"at CogSci'11 in Boston in July):
29 student participants were asked to design a device to move balls from one box to another. The design prompt included some detailed requirements about how the design should of should not be such as that the balls can not be damaged. The participants were guided through a design process consisting of the following steps: idea generation, concept refinement, and final build. The students showed their designs after each step to a reviewer. The participants were divided into three groups: group 1 received a standard technical feedback typical to engineering education, group 2 received a crit style feedback typical in arts, and group 3 only showed their designs to the reviewer but received no feedback.

Results:
At this initial stage we observed the changes (improvements) made to designs after each feedback session. While we found some expected results such as the technical feedback group (1) was most likely to not change their design if there was no design requirement violation, we also find that the no feed back group (group 3) was most likely to change their concept of even come up with a totally new concept than the other two groups. This was highly surprising. Further work is needed to investigate why this happened. Could it be that seeing your design being reviewed but not hearing if it needed improvements was the best motivator to improve the design on your own?

Originality Challenge!

Try this challenge before reading the entire post:

Come up with multiple solutions to move 5 balls from one box to another without touching or damaging the balls or boxes.

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(please come up with solutions before reading on)

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What did you come up with? A grabber or a slide maybe?

Here's the results from an experiment we did with 30 students. The students all got to sketch their solutions.

Solution (How many out of 30 total concepts)
Slide (16)
Grabber (8)
Robot (1)
Grabber/slide combination (1)
Conveyor belt (1)
Vacuum suction cup (1)
Vacuum suction tube (1)
Hand (1) (does not meet design requirement)


Did you come up with something different?

Out of curiosity we posed the same question to a few faculty members in engineering and got various types of grabbers again....how Original!

How Letting Go of Objectives can Help Creativity and Discovery

Lecture at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design)

The title: How Letting Go of Objectives can Help Creativity and Discovery

This talk by Evolutionary Computer Scientist Dr. Kenneth O. Stanley will examine the negative effect of explicit objectives on creative discovery and the liberation that is possible when we abandon their false security. Although a common first step in many creative endeavors is to set objectives, recent experiments in the field of evolutionary computation (an area of artificial intelligence) have begun to reveal new insight into... why objectives often inadvertently damage the very process of discovery they aim to guide. In particular, especially in ambitious projects, objectives can blind us to essential stepping stones on the road to long-term innovation. Through several experiments in a process called interactive evolution and with a computer algorithm called "novelty search," this talk will expose the delicate nature of promising stepping stones and contemplate why reaching them sometimes may require abandoning the tantalizing idea that great works require great objectives.

The talk will be followed by a panel where Dr. Stanley will be accompanied by RISD professors who are also experts in the process of search to answer your questions.

This lecture is currently being digitized. In the meanwhile, here's a link to a different version of the talk (a bit more geared toward a Technical Audience) without the Q+A panel, that we might want to check out.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Searching-Without-Objectives

Look for our upcoming poster at CogSci 2011! Here's the abstract:

Design fixation is a common problem in engineering. In two experiments, we implement two educational interventions, prototyping and critical feedback, to help reduce design fixation, which is defined as adherence to one's own design. We found that constant prototyping across the design process reduced fixation in the final product. Surprisingly, we also found that not receiving feedback reduced fixation in the final product. Implications for engineering design education are discussed.

Innovation Through Design Thinking

Dear team,

I found this: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/357

The emphasis is on "Design thinkers must set out like anthropologists or psychologists, investigating how people experience the world emotionally and cognitively."

I think this was what I was trying to get at with the question "day in the life of..." where empathy for the user/audience was strongly considered for solving a design problem.

I hope you enjoy it!

Innovations in 2010

Popular Science always publishes a great list of innovations. Many are great innovations by engineers, such as an ultrasound device that can be brought anywhere.

More creative innovations at http://www.popsci.com/bown/2010