Design Ideas and Impasses: the Role of Open Goals

Understanding the source of creative or innovative design ideas has the potential to provide a number of insights into design problem solving as well as practical benefits. The work presented here is a first step at generalizing some findings from the psychological laboratory to a design task. Open goals have been shown to influence cognition so that information about open goals, or unsolved problems, is likely to be incorporated into future problem solving attempts even when that information is presented in a second task unrelated to the original problem. The results of a study on design problem solving are presented, and these results show that open design problem solving goals direct the acquisition of information relevant to the unsolved design problem. Participants read a series of text passages during a break in problem solving with one of those passages containing information that was a distant analogy to the design problem. This information influenced problem solving including how likely participants were to change their representation of the problem. Some of the implications of these results for our understanding of design problem solving are discussed.