Collaboration support method based on analyzing individual differences in designers' idea evaluation

Abstract

To maximize designers' creativity during collaborative design processes, this paper focuses on designers' individual differences, especially differences in their idea evaluations, and proposes an analytical method for revealing their differences. During creative group activity, when a designer represents an idea using some words or a short sentence, the others imagine the concrete image of the idea form the presented words and evaluate the concretized idea in their mind. However, the results of their concretizations and evaluations vary among designers in most cases. Such differences or diversities seem to be undesirable, but they have a huge potential for leading new ideas during divergent processes of exploring ideas. Therefore, the method proposed here reveals designers' individual differences by analyzing the results of their idea evaluations and encourages their further idea explanations. In addition, to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, the case study is carried out and its results and detailed processes are analyzed.