35. Study on the Influence of Varied Statements in Design Briefs on Solution Outcomes

Need statement, one of the components of any given design brief, is a concise expression of the functional requirement. A need statement can be written at varied levels of abstraction—from being very specific or concrete to very generic or abstract providing a range of possibilities. Such need statements provided in design briefs can play the role of stimuli during ideation. There were no earlier studies that looked at the effect of stimuli in need statements at varied levels of abstraction on solution outcomes. We conducted a study where design students were asked to generate design ideas to a given brief. Four varied need statements were embedded in the design brief to create four variants of brief. Each participant received only one variant of the design brief which had only one need statement. Participants were given a time of over an hour for generating design ideas. The solution outcomes from each participant were collected and scored by reviewers for three factors—novelty, appropriateness and usability based on an earlier published framework. Our study showed that the ideational fluency was greater in need statements with artifact mentioned at basic level of abstraction or in other words more concrete. We found that novelty score increases to some extent with the level of abstraction defined for the artifact mentioned in the need statement while minor influence was reflected on scores for appropriateness and usability.