"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
Innovation is a goal, sometimes elusive, of design. In this project the PI and his team will, within the context of a Master?s course in information system design, construct and test a series of exercises aimed at promoting innovative designs, inspired by thinking about creative processes in general and the information technology design process in particular. Information design is an ideal platform for the study and promotion of creative processes, because the topological structure of information systems allows development of tools for objective representation of the accuracy, variability, and similarity of designs. Three increasingly broad and sophisticated sets of exercises will be developed and tested. The first set will use exploratory play with the elements of IT design (nodes and links) and priming of fundamental topological structures (trees and hubs) in order to elicit more advanced and creative solutions for initial design problems. The second set will use techniques that encourage abstraction to enable students to transfer designs across domains. The third set will employ perceptual manipulation of design topology and conceptual comparisons of design topologies to increase the variability of design solutions students invent. The tool for representing and comparing designs will be turned into a tool for encouraging the generation of varied and novel designs. Because the experiments will be embedded in a design course, the exercises will benefit both the students and the research. Such an undertaking requires a team with expertise across several disciplines. Collectively, the PI and his team have expertise in human comprehension and production of diagrams, research design and evaluation of educational methods, and the design of software-intensive information systems. The team bases its predictions and techniques on their prior work on the development of design expertise in the classroom context; the team has already produced computational tools that serve as the foundation for the proposed research.
Broader Impacts: Poor design, and the resulting poor software, impedes coordination in many government and corporate institutions. Improvements in the education of designers may be amplified by their efforts in practice and in mentoring other designers over the length of their careers. Although there are many methods recommended for teaching systems design, few of these have been empirically tested. This research is novel in that it will look at the intermediate product of IT design, topological sketches, in order to understand the cognitive processes of creativity. From this, the PI will construct methods to assess and to increase design innovation that will be useful to other researchers and instructors. Specific impacts should include improving systems design education, consequently improving the efficacy of software and social systems created by graduates of the PI's and other design programs, which in turn may help us improve a broad range of human activities. The research has the potential to be transformative, because design is the way we interact with the future.
