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Design Education Today pp 37–60Cite as

Teaching Design Innovation Skills: Design Heuristics Support Creating, Developing, and Combining Ideas

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Abstract

An innovative idea generation process explores a variety of diverse design ideas. While challenging to achieve even for expert designers, support tools can assist designers as they learn to generate more ideas, and more varied ideas, throughout their idea generation process. In this chapter, we summarize evidence identifying Design Heuristics in product design, and describe how they can be employed within a variety of lesson structures to foster idea generation. We describe alternative lesson plans using the 77 Design Heuristics: specifically, in initial idea generation, idea development, generation of subcomponent ideas, and team design. The Design Heuristics have been shown to support learning and innovative design outcomes across educational levels and design disciplines.

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Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 1323251 & 1322552.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Michigan, 2350 Hayward Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Shanna R. Daly

  2. Iowa State University, Ames, USA

    Seda McKilligan

  3. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Keelin Leahy

  4. University of Michigan, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Colleen M. Seifert

Authors
  1. Shanna R. Daly
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  2. Seda McKilligan
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  3. Keelin Leahy
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  4. Colleen M. Seifert
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shanna R. Daly .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Industrial Design, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Dirk Schaefer

  2. School of Engineering, Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

    Graham Coates

  3. School of Engineering and Innovation, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    Claudia Eckert

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Daly, S.R., McKilligan, S., Leahy, K., Seifert, C.M. (2019). Teaching Design Innovation Skills: Design Heuristics Support Creating, Developing, and Combining Ideas. In: Schaefer, D., Coates, G., Eckert, C. (eds) Design Education Today. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17134-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17134-6_3

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-17134-6

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