Concept Chaining Patterns During Ideation Using Digital Tablets

Abstract Digital tablets are becoming increasingly popular as sketching tools, in part because they allow designers to store many sketches in one place and to easily switch between types of sketching instruments. These tools include features such as smoothing lines and copy/paste that aim to improve ease and quality of sketching. The ability to copy and paste elements of drawings affords designers the possibility to quickly modify and iterate on sketches, which may in turn influence the way in which designers engage with concept generation. This potential impact of digital sketching tools on concept evolution patterns has been minimally explored in a qualitative manner but not quantitatively. We present the results of a controlled human subjects study that investigates how the use of tablets (iPads) may influence concept evolution patterns when compared to pen and paper sketching during an engineering design concept generation problem. We explore two main research questions. First, whether tablet use for sketching, as opposed to paper and pen sketching, is linked with more concept chaining (sequential iteration on a concept). We hypothesize that ideation on tablets will be linked with more concept chaining due to sketching features on the tablet such as copy and paste. Second, we ask whether concept chaining patterns will be different for design prompts that have multiple functional requirements, aiming to understand how tool use interacts with prompt complexity. Here, we hypothesize that the concept chaining patterns for the primary functional requirement of a multicomponent prompt will be consistent with the patterns of concept chaining for a prompt with only one requirement, but that secondary functional requirements may not exhibit these clear chaining patterns. We find that tablet users demonstrate more concept chaining than paper and pen users despite having a similar number of related ideas overall. We also find that concept chaining patterns do change for design prompts with higher numbers of functional requirements especially because not all ideas address all parts of the prompt, but that the primary functional requirement results exhibit the same concept chaining patterns with more chains present on tablet sketching than paper and pen sketching.