The Impact of Product Dissection Activities on the Novelty of Design Outcomes

This paper explores the effect of a product dissection activity on design novelty in engineering design. Novelty is an important aspect of design ideation effectiveness. Therefore, identifying the factors that influence novelty will expand the understanding of the design process, as well as improve design pedagogy. Previous studies have found that participation in product dissection activities positively impacted creativity, but did not study creativity in terms of novelty, making it unclear if product dissection activities will impact the novelty of generated designs. Furthermore, although product dissection has been studied in team environments, individual factors such as the personality traits of the team members was not explored for their effect on the exposure to the dissection activity, and hence the effect on the novelty of generated designs. Our empirical experimentation showed that extraverted participants had a higher level of exposure to the body design dissection activity and developed more novel ideas than those who were not extraverts. These results contribute to our understanding on how team-based dissection activities influence the novelty of generated designs in an engineering design setting.