This line of work aims to better understand problem formuation and early-stage conceptual design processes in humans. The ultimate goal of this work is to construct tools that facilitate creative design. Recent work in this line has explored how to assess design creativity at scale using crowdsourcing and statistical modeling.

Assessing Design Creativity

MacLellan, C.J. (2015). Assessing the Creativity of Designs at Scale. In E. Y. Do (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition (pp. 339-340). New York: ACM Press. doi: 10.1145/2757226.2764770 (pdf)

Problem Formulation Aids

MacLellan, C.J., Langley, P., Shah, J., Dinar, M. (2013) A Computational Aid for Problem Formulation in Early Conceptual Design. Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering,13(3). doi: 10.1115/1.4024714 (pdf)

Understanding Conceptual Design

Dinar, M., Danielescu, A., MacLellan, C.J., Shah, J., Langley, P. (2015) Problem Map: An ontological framework for a computational study of problem formulation in engineering design. Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, 15(3). doi: [10.1115/1.4030076][4] (pdf)

Danielescu, A., Dinar, M., MacLellan, C.J., Shah, J., Langley, P. (2012) The structure of creative design: what problem maps can tell us about problem formulation and creative designers. Proceedings of the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (pp. 437-446). Chicago, Illinois: ASME. doi: 10.1115/DETC2012-70325 (pdf)