Stimulating Creativity: A More Practical Alternative to TRIZ

DS 58-5: Proceedings of ICED 09, the 17th International Conference on Engineering Design, Vol. 5, Design Methods and Tools (pt. 1), Palo Alto, CA, USA, 24.-27.08.2009

Year: 2009
Editor: Norell Bergendahl, M.; Grimheden, M.; Leifer, L.; Skogstad, P.; Lindemann, U.
Author: Howard, Thomas James; Culley, Stephen J; Dekoninck, Elies A
Series: ICED
Section: Design Methods and Tools
Page(s): 205-216

Abstract

Being able to stimulate creative ideas on demand is a desire for engineers, scientists and artists alike. Creative stimulus in the form of the TRIZ inventive principles have shown much potential, however the industrial uptake of such stimuli is limited due to the practicalities of using this TRIZ approach. The following paper proposes a practical alternative to producing creative stimuli termed past for present (p4p) and tests both approaches during industrial brainstorm sessions. The results showed that all creative stimuli tools were of benefit. The p4p tool performed best in terms of the rate of idea production and levelled the TRIZ tool in terms of the quality of ideas.

Keywords: Design, Creativity, Stimuli, Information management

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