Assessing similarity between design ideas is an inherent part of many design evaluations to measure novelty. In such evaluation tasks, humans excel at making mental connections among diverse knowledge sets to score ideas on their uniqueness. However, their decisions about novelty are often subjective and difficult to explain. In this paper, we demonstrate a way to uncover human judgment of design idea similarity using two-dimensional (2D) idea maps. We derive these maps by asking participants for simple similarity comparisons of the form “Is idea A more similar to idea B or to idea C?” We show that these maps give insight into the relationships between ideas and help understand the design domain. We also propose that novel ideas can be identified by finding outliers on these idea maps. To demonstrate our method, we conduct experimental evaluations on two datasets—colored polygons (known answer) and milk frother sketches (unknown answer). We show that idea maps shed light on factors considered by participants in judging idea similarity and the maps are robust to noisy ratings. We also compare physical maps made by participants on a white-board to their computationally generated idea maps to compare how people think about spatial arrangement of design items. This method provides a new direction of research into deriving ground truth novelty metrics by combining human judgments and computational methods.
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February 2019
Research-Article
Interpreting Idea Maps: Pairwise Comparisons Reveal What Makes Ideas Novel
Faez Ahmed,
Faez Ahmed
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742
e-mail: faez00@umd.edu
University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742
e-mail: faez00@umd.edu
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Sharath Kumar Ramachandran,
Sharath Kumar Ramachandran
School of Engineering Design,
Technology and Professional Programs,
The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16801
e-mail: sharath@psu.edu
Technology and Professional Programs,
The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16801
e-mail: sharath@psu.edu
Search for other works by this author on:
Mark Fuge,
Mark Fuge
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742
e-mail: fuge@umd.edu
University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742
e-mail: fuge@umd.edu
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Samuel Hunter,
Samuel Hunter
Industrial and Organizational Psychology,
The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16801
e-mail: sth11@psu.edu
The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16801
e-mail: sth11@psu.edu
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Scarlett Miller
Scarlett Miller
School of Engineering Design,
Technology and Professional Programs,
The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16801
e-mail: shm13@psu.edu
Technology and Professional Programs,
The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16801
e-mail: shm13@psu.edu
Search for other works by this author on:
Faez Ahmed
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742
e-mail: faez00@umd.edu
University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742
e-mail: faez00@umd.edu
Sharath Kumar Ramachandran
School of Engineering Design,
Technology and Professional Programs,
The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16801
e-mail: sharath@psu.edu
Technology and Professional Programs,
The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16801
e-mail: sharath@psu.edu
Mark Fuge
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742
e-mail: fuge@umd.edu
University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742
e-mail: fuge@umd.edu
Samuel Hunter
Industrial and Organizational Psychology,
The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16801
e-mail: sth11@psu.edu
The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16801
e-mail: sth11@psu.edu
Scarlett Miller
School of Engineering Design,
Technology and Professional Programs,
The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16801
e-mail: shm13@psu.edu
Technology and Professional Programs,
The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16801
e-mail: shm13@psu.edu
1Corresponding author.
Open-source code implementing our approach is available at: https://github.com/IDEALLAB/idea_mapContributed by the Design Theory and Methodology Committee of ASME for publication in the JOURNAL OF MECHANICAL DESIGN. Manuscript received June 30, 2018; final manuscript received October 19, 2018; published online December 20, 2018. Assoc. Editor: Katja Holtta-Otto.
J. Mech. Des. Feb 2019, 141(2): 021102 (13 pages)
Published Online: December 20, 2018
Article history
Received:
June 30, 2018
Revised:
October 19, 2018
Citation
Ahmed, F., Ramachandran, S. K., Fuge, M., Hunter, S., and Miller, S. (December 20, 2018). "Interpreting Idea Maps: Pairwise Comparisons Reveal What Makes Ideas Novel." ASME. J. Mech. Des. February 2019; 141(2): 021102. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4041856
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