Fostering creativity in design - An empirical study on improvement of requirement-satisfaction with introduction of indeate tool

Abstract

In today's highly competitive market, product success is determined by two critical factors - innovation and sustainability. While innovation looks to rampantly satisfy the consumers' ever growing requirements with creative solutions, sustainability attempts to rationalise the precarious demands of desired requirements on economy, society and environment. InDeaTe - Innovation Design database and Template, a web-based, design process guidance tool, supports design of sustainable systems by incorporating sustainability requirements into the design process. This paper investigates the potential of the tool to improve the usefulness of a design, one of the indicators of the creativity of the solutions, apart from its novelty. Comparative studies are conducted to assess the improvement of 'requirement-satisfaction',a proxy measure for usefulness. Upon introduction of the tool into the design process, significant improvements are reported, thereby reflecting the ability of InDeaTe to increase the usefulness of solutions and foster creativity in design.