Think Outside the Box? Not So Fast.
News
Traditional thinking holds that great design concepts stem from sources distant from the original problem. Velcro, for example, came into being when civil engineer George de Mestral had to remove burrs from his dog's fur after a hunting trip and began a microscopic investigation into how they worked. A group of researchers in Carnegie Mellon's ProtoLab has found that thinking outside of the box isn't always the best strategy, though. In fact, the best design solutions often build on ideas more closely related to the problem at hand.
In a paper in press with Design Studies, post-doc Joel Chan and Assistant Professor Steven Dow from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center explored how the conceptual distance between cited ideas and the problem domain related to its inspirational value. In other words, is it better to think outside the box, or stay in it?
Chan worked with Christian Schunn, professor of psychology and a senior scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, to collect data through OpenIDEO — a web-based, crowd-sourced innovation platform intended to help people create and share solutions for a wide range of social and environmental problems. During a 10-week period, Chan and his collaborators collected data on OpenIDEO's creative process that included more than 350 participants and thousands of ideas. After collecting the data, they created an algorithm to determine whether a cited idea was conceptually near or far from the problem's origin. In the end, their model showed that innovators who cited ideas conceptually closer to the original problem were more likely to produce shortlisted solutions as selected by OpenIDEO's expert panel.
"Instead of seeing an effect of far inspirations, I saw that ideas built on source ideas more closely related to the problem tended to be selected more often," Chan said. "And I saw the same pattern across 12 very different problems—ranging from preventing human rights violations to fostering greater connectedness in urban communities to improving employment prospects for young people."
"This has implications for how innovators might scour different sources for inspiration," Dow said. "Creating nearby variations of other good ideas has merit."
"For people needing fresh inspiration for a problem, these findings imply that you shouldn’t just go off and talk to random people or read things totally unrelated to your problem," Chan said. "These might yield novel ideas, but not necessarily useful and novel ideas."
Their work is also receiving media attention in publications like Science Daily and Phys.org.
To learn more about ProtoLab and its work, click here.