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Abstract Cognitive factors such as association, memory, and combination have been verified to be related to the creative design process. However, limited research has considered the effects of cognitive factors and their interaction on creative processes in practical creative design processes. This study aimed to detect the interactive effects of cognitive factors on creative processes in a practical creative design process. In particular, how the sequence of cognitive factors affects creativity quality levels of the creative solutions was investigated. Seventy-one participants were recruited to undertake a design task using the think-aloud method. The results of this study are as follows. (i) The sequences of cognitive factors can contribute to different creativity quality levels of solutions. The sequence of semantic memory, common association, remote association, episodic memory, remote combination, idea expression, and idea evaluation is more likely to lead to a higher creativity quality level of solutions. (ii) The repetition of the same cognitive factor in a creative design process, especially semantic memory, does not necessarily contribute to a high-creativity-quality-level solution. (iii) Creativity quality levels of solutions are related to how many cognitive factors categories are involved in the creative design process. The more cognitive factors included, the higher the creativity quality of the solutions will be.

Abstract This study aims to take higher-education students as examples to understand and compare artistic and engineering mindsets in creative processes using EEG. Fifteen Master of Fine Arts (MFA) visual arts and fifteen Master of Engineering (MEng) design engineering students were recruited and asked to complete alternative uses tasks wearing an EEG headset. The results revealed that (1) the engineering-mindset students responded to creative ideas faster than artistic-mindset students. (2) Although in creative processes both artistic- and engineering-mindset students showed Theta, Alpha, and Beta wave activity, the active brain areas are slightly different. The active brain areas of artistic-mindset students in creative processes are mainly in the frontal and occipital lobes; while the whole brain (frontal, oriental, temporal, and occipital lobes) was active in creative processes of engineering-mindset students. (3) During the whole creative process, the brain active level of artistic-mindset students was higher than that of engineering-mindset students. The results of this study fills gaps in existing research where only active brain areas and band waves were compared between artistic- and engineering-mindset students in creative processes. For quick thinking in terms of fluency of generating creative ideas, engineering students have an advantage in comparison to those from the visual arts. Also, the study provided more evidence that mindset can affect the active levels of the brain areas. Finally, this study provides educators with more insights on how to stimulate students’ creative ability.

Abstract This paper proposes a new method for real-time terrain recognition-based navigation for mobile robots. Mobile robots performing tasks in unstructured environments need to adapt their trajectories in real-time to achieve safe and efficient navigation in complex terrains. However, current methods largely depend on visual and IMU (inertial measurement units) that demand high computational resources for real-time applications. In this paper, a real-time terrain identification-based navigation method is proposed using an on-board tapered whisker-based reservoir computing system. The nonlinear dynamic response of the tapered whisker was investigated in various analytical and Finite Element Analysis frameworks to demonstrate its reservoir computing capabilities. Numerical simulations and experiments were cross-checked with each other to verify that whisker sensors can separate different frequency signals directly in the time domain and demonstrate the computational superiority of the proposed system, and that different whisker axis locations and motion velocities provide variable dynamical response information. Terrain surface-following experiments demonstrated that our system could accurately identify changes in the terrain in real-time and adjust its trajectory to stay on specific terrain.

IntroductionNeurotechnology approaches, such as electroencephalography (EEG), can aid understanding of the cognitive processes behind creativity.MethodsTo identify and compare the EEG characteristics of creativity-related cognitive factors (remote association, common association, combination, recall, and retrieval), 30 participants were recruited to conduct an EEG induction study.ResultsFrom the event-related potential (ERP) results and spectral analysis, the study supports that creativity is related to the frontal lobe areas of the brain and common association is an unconscious process.DiscussionThe results help explain why some creativity-related cognitive factors are involved either more or less readily than others in the creative design process from workload aspects. This study identifies the part of the brain that is involved in the combination cognitive factor and detects the ERP results on cognitive factors. This study can be used by designers and researchers to further understand the cognitive processes of creativity.

Consideration of sustainability in product development is becoming increasingly important and encompasses many aspects of product design. In this study, a bibliometric review of recent sustainable product design publications using Web of Science and VOSViewer is carried out. The review indicates that the majority of publications concerning sustainable product design is oriented towards environmental science-led subject areas and production-led journals. Analysis of author keyword co-occurrences reveals that circular economy, life cycle assessment, sustainable management, and optimization are the most popular topics in sustainable product design research. The analysis also reveals that the researchers fail to link sustainability research to activities in product design, which leads to the lack of access to relevant research that can make products more sustainable. Building on the findings, the authors propose four future research directions that aim to guide researchers to better correlate sustainability with product design, namely: sustainability interpretation, integration, assessment and validation, and improvement.

Although products can contribute to ecosystems positively, they can cause negative environmental impacts throughout their life cycles, from obtaining raw material, production, and use, to end of life. It is reported that most negative environmental impacts are decided at early design phases, which suggests that the determination of product sustainability should be considered as early as possible, such as during the conceptual design stage, when it is still possible to modify the design concept. However, most of the existing concept evaluation methods or tools are focused on assessing the feasibility or creativity of the concepts generated, lacking the measurements of sustainability of concepts. The paper explores key factors related to sustainable design with regard to environmental impacts, and describes a set of objective measures of sustainable product design concept evaluation, namely, material, production, use, and end of life. The rationales of the four metrics are discussed, with corresponding measurements. A case study is conducted to demonstrate the use and effectiveness of the metrics for evaluating product design concepts. The paper is the first study to explore the measurement of product design sustainability focusing on the conceptual design stage. It can be used as a guideline to measure the level of sustainability of product design concepts to support designers in developing sustainable products. Most significantly, it urges the considerations of sustainability design aspects at early design phases, and also provides a new research direction in concept evaluation regarding sustainability.

Idea generation is significant in design, but coming up with creative ideas is often challenging. This paper presents a computer-based tool, called the Combinator, for assisting designers to produce creative ideas. The tool is developed based on an approach simulating aspects of human cognition in achieving combinational creativity. It can generate combinational prompts in text and image forms through combining unrelated ideas. A case study has been conducted to evaluate the Combinator. The study results indicate that the Combinator, in its current formulation, has assisted the tool users involved in the case study in improving the fluency of idea generation, as well as increasing the originality, usefulness, and flexibility of the ideas generated. The results also indicate that the tool could benefit its users in generating high-novelty and high-quality ideas effectively. The Combinator is considered to be beneficial in expanding the design space, increasing better idea occurrence, improving design space exploration, and enhancing the design success rate.

Within the last few years, a need for renewed product personalisation has been observed in some markets such as consumer electronics, fashion to meet the exact demands of the customers. Product customisation emphasises the fulfilment of explicit requirements of a defined market segment, but product individualisation targets at satisfying the particular needs of a customer. Mass Individualisation (MI) is a new product design approach comprising of an open hardware platform and multiple modules to be integrated with the platform. It gives freedom to end-users to integrate different modules into the platform as per their choice. Technological and strategic integration of all actors involved in the design process is the primary focus of this research. This paper identifies key areas which need to be focussed on to realise this approach and convert it into an industrial practice by an explorative study of existing product design and customisation approaches. An industrial survey was conducted, and results for the industrial implication and insights on this approach are presented. The findings show that the end product from product design for MI will be more creative and innovative by the networking of all actors, and offers more individualised and technologically advanced products.