Impact of Problem Contexts on the Diversity of Design Solutions: An Exploratory Case Study

The role of ideation in design is to generate design solutions that have the potential for further development. Having many diverse ideas increases the potential for successful design outcomes by increasing the number of possibilities available during concept evaluation and selection phases. How do we define the problems that would allow for the most diverse solution space? The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of how different contexts impacted the variety of solutions generated within the solution space, by a diverse group of students. In this exploratory case study, we report on (1) how we identified a set of design problems with diverse contexts appropriate for students with varied backgrounds, and (2) how we explored the impact of these problem contexts on the size of the solution space, aiming to select the contexts with the most diverse pool of ideas for our ongoing studies1. Our results show that diversity judged by multiple raters was consistent and provided us with evidence to support the decision of which design problems to use in our further studies.

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