Understanding design ideation mechanisms through multilevel aligned empirical studies

The overall objectives of the study are to identify key components of ideation methods and develop effectiveness metrics. This paper presents experimental results conducted on six ideation components (Provocative Stimuli, Suspend Judgment, Flexible Representation, Frame of Reference Shifting, Incubation, and Example Exposure). These experiments were conducted simultaneously at the Design (engineering) and Lab (cognitive psychology) levels following an experimental procedure previously developed to align these two levels of experiments. Results show the effectiveness of the ideation components in terms of effectiveness metrics and also the extent of alignment of the results from these two levels. Understanding of ideation components has been gained (main effects ease of manipulation and interactions).