Ten years have passed since the preparation of the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation (IJDCI). The editors at that time collected the reflections and i...

This paper aims at improving the efficiency of an inventive problem solving process for complex systems, by reducing the iterations due to the emergence of new problems caused by the implementation of the identified solution. The proposed algorithm guides the problem solver in choosing the most important contradiction to be faced with ARIZ85-C and provides further instructions about the best approach to be followed. Such purpose is achieved by organizing the characteristic parameters of a Technical System according to a specific metric, which allows both the construction of a Network of Contradictions and the definition of criteria for identifying priorities. An exemplary application of the proposed method has been carried out in the field of exhaust noise in 4-stroke engines.

This paper reports an experiment that aims at providing new evidence to reinforce contradictory conclusions, as available in engineering design literature, on the effect of analogical distance on ideation performance of designers. The experiment involved 84 graduate students in Mechanical Engineering, with typical competencies on engineering design, but without any specific skill on analogy-based idea generation. The subjects were exposed to three different treatments (near-, medium-, far-field analogies) whose design performance has been compared to a control group. The observation confirms that designers not specifically trained in designing-by-analogy get benefit from sources of inspiration that share the same (sub-)functions and context of the target system, as their idea generation process lead to ideas having higher novelty and quality compared to the outcomes of subjects exposed to more distant analogies. The observed results also show that the exploration of the design space gets positively affected.