How can AI support the creation of novel ideas in product design

Hamilton, Victoria and Brisco, Ross and Grierson, Hilary; Kim, Jisun and Storer, Ian and Whitehead, Timothy and Buck, Lyndon and Grierson, Hilary and Bohemia, Erik, eds. (2024) How can AI support the creation of novel ideas in product design. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education (E&PDE 2024). Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education . The Design Society, GBR, pp. 133-138. ISBN 9781912254200 (https://doi.org/10.35199/EPDE.2024.23)

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Abstract

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides an exciting opportunity in many fields and aspects of life. In the field of design, one area to be explored, is how AI could be used to support a designer to develop more novel ideas at the idea generation stage of the product development journey. In this paper, we explore how AI can be utilised to support a traditional 6-3-5 creative design methods workshop, and whether it increases the novelty of the concepts. In our workshop, students were tasked with using the 6-3-5 method to generate ideas for a product which could make life easier for an arthritis sufferer when undertaking tasks in the kitchen. Some of the students were advised they could use Chat GPT to support idea creation; some of the students were advised they could use Google to support idea creation; and the remaining students were advised they would not be able to use any additional support for idea generation. This group was considered as the control group. A feedback survey was distributed among the participants to gather their thoughts on whether the use of AI/Google had assisted them in the application of the design method to generate more novel and creative concepts. Further analysis was then conducted, with a focus on novelty, on the outputs of the 6-3-5 to assess whether the novelty of the concepts in the AI/Google groups was greater than that of the control group. The results of the workshop indicated that the ideas generated with AI support were more novel than those without, and that students utilising AI became more relaxed in their approach to idea generation, relying on AI before fully exhausting their own ideas. Interestingly, the perceived helpfulness of AI was also not fully appreciated by the more novice designers in comparison to those more experienced designers. In this paper we discuss how AI could be used by educators to support teaching and application of more creative design methods such as 6-3-5.

ORCID iDs

Hamilton, Victoria ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9006-0124, Brisco, Ross ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8216-9218 and Grierson, Hilary ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9478-7822; Kim, Jisun, Storer, Ian, Whitehead, Timothy, Buck, Lyndon, Grierson, Hilary and Bohemia, Erik
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)