Abstract
Digital tablets are becoming increasingly popular as a sketching tool. Features such as the ability to copy and paste elements of drawings allow designers to quickly modify and iterate on sketches, which may in turn influence how designers engage with ideation. This potential impact of digital sketching tools on concept evolution patterns has been minimally explored in a qualitative manner but not quantitatively. We present the results of a controlled human subjects study that investigates how the use of tablets (iPads) may influence concept evolution patterns during an engineering design concept generation problem. We explore whether or not tablet sketching, as opposed to paper and pen sketching, is linked with more concept chaining (sequential iteration on a concept). We hypothesize that ideation on tablets will be linked with more concept chaining due to features on the tablet such as copy and paste. We also investigate whether concept chaining patterns will be different for design prompts with multiple functional requirements. We find that tablet users demonstrate more concept chaining than paper and pen users despite having a similar number of related ideas overall. We find that concept chaining patterns do change for design prompts with higher numbers of functional requirements especially because not all ideas address all parts of the prompt, but that the primary functional requirement results exhibit the same concept chaining patterns with more chains present on tablet sketching than paper and pen sketching.
