In the early conceptual stage of design, novice designers and professionals experience different levels of fixation. Design tools and workflows can support designers to explore creative opportunities. Patent data tool for engineering design purposes is one example, using the design-by-analogy method to facilitate divergent ideation. This work will examine how designers can use the patent stimuli to explore both design problems and solutions and in what way.
The study applied a within-subject experiment with 6 participants. Each participant did brainstorming tasks with patent data tool and baseline tool. After the experiment, they gave feedbacks on the patent data tool. The concurrent think-aloud protocol, screen recording and idea sketches were used for explorative data analysis.
From the participants' self-report, they all gave positive feedbacks on the tool's value for acquiring new knowledge for divergent ideation. External raters clustered all the ideas by categories, following function-behavior-structure theory model. The overall fixation rate in the patent data condition did not bypass the baseline condition. From qualitative analysis on the ideation process, the patent data tool effectively eliminated knowledge-based fixation in the query stage. Its textual stimuli helped to release conceptual fixation if they were not exposed to solution visuals. The patent stimuli inspired participants with solution directly but did not provide problems consistently. The limitations of patent data tools are discussed. It points out the possibilities of using supplementary tools to better support exploration on problems, using analogies and thinking at an abstract level and overcoming conceptual fixation.
Lastly, future studies are needed to look into a combination of new tools to work with the patent data tool. Designers begin with understanding problem and user contexts from common sense knowledge tool. Afterwards, the patent data and biological-inspired tool can facilitate designers to ideate desired functions and related product behaviors. Ultimately, text to generative image tool can help conceptualize structural design. Future studies are needed to evaluate the effect of this new method.