An Empirical Study of the Effectiveness of Selected Cognitive Aids on Multiple Design Tasks

The objective of this work is to study the concept generation effectiveness of three cognitive design aids: TRIZ—an ideation method, Sketching—a representation format, and use of the Smartpen—a journaling technology. The hypothesis is that TRIZ, Sketching and Smartpen, each improve the effectiveness of the concept generation process. The participating subjects belong to Penn State’s Introduction to Work Design (IE 327) course. The course focuses on concepts of work design and measurement applied to manufacturing and service industries with a focus on improving worker performance, health and safety analyses. In the paper, we report on two sequentially completed design case studies, which allowed us to study the same group of subjects under two conditions. The first case study involved redesigns of a wire-cutter and a screw driver to improve work productivity. The second case consisted of analyzing an ultrasound operation for which students suggested improvements to the workplace and a redesign of the ultrasound transducer taking into account ergonomics and human factors principles. Our results indicate that indeed the tested design aids improved the ideation effectiveness; Smartpen has done the best in terms of increasing quantity of ideas generated, and TRIZ was the best in enhancing novelty.