Exploring the Utility of Product Dissection for Early-phase Idea Generation

Product dissection is a tool widely used in industry and academia as a means to understand the components of existing products and identify opportunities for redesign. Since dissection is widely practiced and typically occurs before idea generation, it has the potential to greatly affect the creativity of design outcomes. However, researchers have only just begun to explore how dissection effects creativity in design, and thus little research to date has explored how variations in dissection activities affect creativity. Therefore, in this paper we present the results of a controlled experiment developed to understand how the type and number of products dissected and the structure and medium of the dissection task (electronic versus physical) impacts creativity. Our quantitative findings (from ANOVAs) are paired with qualitative analysis (interview results) to provide rationale for our results and insights into their cognitive underpinnings. The results from this study indicate that the structure of the dissection activity, the medium of dissection, and the number of products dissected impacts the variety of the generated concepts while the analogical distance and number of products impacts design novelty. These research findings are used to develop recommendations for the alteration of dissection methods for inspiring creative thought in engineering design.