COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Extreme Experience Design for Breaking Barriers to Innovation (0825461/0825713) Katja Hölttä-Otto (PI, UMass-Dartmouth), Carolyn Conner Seepersad (PI, UT Austin), Art Markman (Co-PI, UT Austin)
The research objective of this award is to establish a structured conceptual design methodology, called Extreme Experience Design (EED), that stimulates innovation of breakthrough products by engaging designers in extreme experiences as part of concept generation. Extreme experiences expose the designer(s) to modified physical usage environments (e.g., moisture or noise) or altered means of interacting with the product physically, cognitively, or sensorially (e.g., limited dexterity via gloves or limited hearing via earplugs). These experiences are designed to help designers empathize with customers under a variety of conditions, and thereby design for the types of context-related latent needs that lead to breakthrough products. A series of experiments is planned to design and refine the EED methodology, to investigate its effectiveness, and to better understand how a designer's pre-ideation experiences affect the results of conceptual design. A two-phased Design of Experiments approach will be used to test the effectiveness of the EED methodology. The first phase will be designed to investigate the impact of extreme experiences and designer-prototype interaction, together and separately, on the outcomes of the conceptual design process. The second phase will be designed to investigate more closely whether different types of extreme experiences lead to different types of innovation.
If successful, the results of this research will provide fundamental knowledge of the effects of extreme experiences and designer-prototype interaction on design fixation and a designer's ability to innovate. The knowledge will be incorporated in a new conceptual design approach, EED, that has the potential to enhance designers' abilities to generative innovative concepts by engaging them in pre-ideation, extreme experiences. Also, the proposed research is expected to have significant broader impacts. Research will be transferred from the laboratories to K-12 students, university students, industry, and the general public by means of online resources, outreach programs, industry interaction, and improved capabilities for universal design that improves quality of life.
The primary objective of this research was to investigate means to break barriers to innovation. More specifically, the goal was to investigate if and how types of empathic product interactions just prior to concept generation phase will lead to more innovative solutions. To begin, innovation was formally defined by investigating over 200 award winning products. It was found that, when compared to all the other products in the market, the innovative products tended to be unique in user interactions, in size and layout as well as in how the product interacted with its environment. These three areas were present in 60-80% of the products wheras function and cost related imporvemts were less common in the innovative products. The main part of this research, was to establish a novel design method, Empathic Experience Design (EED). The method’s empathic experiences expose the designer(s) to modified physical usage environments (e.g., moisture or noise) or altered means of interacting with the product physically, cognitively, or sensorially (e.g., limited dexterity via gloves or limited hearing via earplugs). These experiences were designed to help designers empathize with customers under a variety of conditions, and thereby design for the types of context-related latent needs that lead to breakthrough products. A series of experiments was conducted to design and refine the EED methodology, to investigate its effectiveness, and to better understand how a designer's pre-ideation experiences affect the results of conceptual design. We found support that the developed EED method helped participants create more innovative concepts, than if the participants were not exposed to these empathic experiences. We further found that the empathic experiences helped in creating product ideas that are more innovative in a broader range of features than simply functioning better. Specifically we find that the method leads to product ideas with significantly improved user interaction. The results of this research provide fundamental knowledge on how these empathic experiences and designer-prototype interaction can be used to improve designer's ability to innovate. The knowledge was incorporated in a new conceptual design approach, EED, that has the potential to enhance designers' abilities to generative innovative concepts by engaging them in pre-ideation, empathic experiences. The research has been transferred from the laboratories to middle school girls via outreach events, university students via new teaching modules, industry via training sessions, and the general public via the multiple publications.
