Engineering meets creativity: a study on a creative tool to design new connections

Designers and engineers in practice can rely on a comprehensive assortment of physical connections such as bolts, adhesives, and snap joints to design a product. However, future materials, processes, and technologies lead to other requirements. Designers must be creative to find new solutions that meet the new requirements. The Design to Connect method presented in this paper was developed to support designers in the ideation of new connections in products. It provides inspiration to expand their design space and support them to generate more ideas. The tool contains 46 cards. Each card contains a heuristic and is illustrated with an inspirational example. Six design drivers can be used to select a subset of the most relevant inspiration cards for a specific context. The tool and the framework are both evaluated in an experimental setup with a relevant sample of novice designers with different educational backgrounds. The results demonstrate that the participants generate significantly higher number of ideas and explore a larger solution space when they apply the tool cards. Selecting a set of relevant inspiration cards in advance does not have a significant effect on the amount of ideas or the size of the solutions space. Furthermore, most participants prefer a less structured approach in their ideation and those with a more abstract level of education explored more ideas and a larger solution space compared to participants with a more practical education.Designers and engineers in practice can rely on a comprehensive assortment of physical connections such as bolts, adhesives, and snap joints to design a product. However, future materials, processes, and technologies lead to other requirements. Designers must be creative to find new solutions that meet the new requirements. The Design to Connect method presented in this paper was developed to support designers in the ideation of new connections in products. It provides inspiration to expand their design space and support them to generate more ideas. The tool contains 46 cards. Each card contains a heuristic and is illustrated with an inspirational example. Six design drivers can be used to select a subset of the most relevant inspiration cards for a specific context. The tool and the framework are both evaluated in an experimental setup with a relevant sample of novice designers with different educational backgrounds. The results demonstrate that the participants generate significantly higher number of ideas and explore a larger solution space when they apply the tool cards. Selecting a set of relevant inspiration cards in advance does not have a significant effect on the amount of ideas or the size of the solutions space. Furthermore, most participants prefer a less structured approach in their ideation and those with a more abstract level of education explored more ideas and a larger solution space compared to participants with a more practical education.A