Impact of Requirements Elicitation Activity on Idea Generation: A Designer Study

This paper presents the findings from an empirical designer study conducted with senior design students to understand the impact of requirement elicitation activity on idea generation. The participants were divided in three groups. The experiment conditions were (1) requirements elicitation (given only problem statement), (2) partial elicitation (given problem and five requirements) and (3) no elicitation (given problem and ten requirements). Participants in the first two conditions were challenged with eliciting requirements first. All participants were also asked to generate solutions. Comparing the requirements addressed in the solutions generated by the participants, it is found that the group that was not primed with the task of eliciting requirements performed better in terms of addressing requirements when compared to other two groups. These findings lead to the inference in conceptual design stage that allowing the students to elicit requirements does not have significant potential benefits while addressing the requirements.