Abstract
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.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 021102 |
| Journal | Journal of Mechanical Design, Transactions Of the ASME |
| Volume | 141 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 1 2019 |
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All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Mechanics of Materials
- Mechanical Engineering
- Computer Science Applications
- Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
Cite this
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Interpreting idea maps : Pairwise comparisons reveal what makes ideas novel. / Ahmed, Faez; Ramachandran, Sharath Kumar; Fuge, Mark; Hunter, Samuel Todd; Miller, Scarlett Rae.
In: Journal of Mechanical Design, Transactions Of the ASME, Vol. 141, No. 2, 021102, 01.02.2019.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
TY - JOUR
T1 - Interpreting idea maps
T2 - Pairwise comparisons reveal what makes ideas novel
AU - Ahmed, Faez
AU - Ramachandran, Sharath Kumar
AU - Fuge, Mark
AU - Hunter, Samuel Todd
AU - Miller, Scarlett Rae
PY - 2019/2/1
Y1 - 2019/2/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85059077795&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85059077795&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1115/1.4041856
DO - 10.1115/1.4041856
M3 - Article
VL - 141
JO - Journal of Mechanical Design - Transactions of the ASME
JF - Journal of Mechanical Design - Transactions of the ASME
SN - 1050-0472
IS - 2
M1 - 021102
ER -