Idea Hitchhiking in the Idea Association Process

Idea association is an important behaviour to generate diverse ideas during the conceptual design stage. In the idea association process, the designer links and generates related ideas in conjunction with other participants by idea hitchhiking. By looking for combinations, more novel and useful ideas are found. For understanding how ideas are hitchhiked and combined, we apply a computational tool called DIM and conduct a design experiment to approach this research. Through the analysis of the generated graph-like structure (called idea map), some observations are found and discussed in this paper.