Development and Validation of a Method for Assessment of Novelty and Requirement Satisfaction in Designing

The metrics of creativity in design proposed in literature are broadly process—or outcome-based. Process-based metrics assess creativity using characteristics of the design process. Outcome-based metrics assess creativity using characteristics of the outcomes of the design process. However, the current metrics rarely address the issue of how to use the results of creativity assessment during the design process, so that creative effort can be spent at appropriate portions of the process for its betterment. To address this, we propose a method for assessing creativity of a design. It has two metrics: (a) a measure for novelty of a design; and (b) a measure of the degree of requirement satisfaction (DRS) by the design. Creativity in the design is taken as the product of its Novelty and DRS. The method is intended to be utilized throughout the design process, where the overall requirements and solutions proposed in the design and their detailed developments can be connected together and tracked in a linked manner for assessing against the above creativity metrics. The method is explained using an example, and its preliminary evaluation, on a short-term design project with multiple teams solving one problem, is discussed.