Concept Generation
Part of Product development process
Cross functional team
If you don’t have a good concept, cheaper to quit
Pugh concept selection matrix
Looks interesting, reminds me of casual analysis I do when trying to make decisions on my own
essentially a scoring grid for different concepts
One idea is to generate concepts by identifying core needs and creating concepts ideas each optimized for a need
Lead users
Users that are reading the product for their use cases
Can follow them to new concepts
One process
Clarify the problem
Search externally
Search internally
Explore systematically
Beware of Cognitive Bias
Confirmation bias
Columbia accident as an example
Daniel Kahneman and Tversky
How to overcome
Call out most likely, least likely
Prospective hindsight
Our system will fail, how did it fail?
Essentially, anything to trigger creativity
Creativity types
Combinatorial creativity
Concept extraction
e.g. comparing an atom to the solar system
Started to augment non-speakers’ dialog using puns
Connecting disparate semantic ideas through language both helps language disabled and is a basis for humor
language play leads to humor and learning
Exploratory creativity
Concept exploration
Transformational creativity
Concept induction
Change style to enable “impossible”
Triz
Specific problem -> general problem -> general solution -> specific solution
Exposes that there are many ways to solve a problem
Generative design
This is the direction System Engineering is heading
Ideally, we want to find all possible forms that could satisfy the function
The trick is eliminating efficiently