Engineering and scientists uses a complex semi-formal process to develop innovative products that bring value to users. While we know a lot about how people become fixated on past solutions and how the scienctific discovery process and the engineering design process can each be structured to lead scientists and designers to new solutions, much remains to be understood the process of insight and innovation, particularly regarding the cognition that underlies it. We brings the theories and methods of cognitive and social psychology to unpack the complex events of design that occur in the real world.

Design Tools to Cognitive Processes to Innovation. We have collected data (~30 hrs/team) from semester-long product realization teams (approximately 60 teams across three yrs of data collection) to understand how the artifacts and tools in the design environment shape cognitive processes like analogy and mental simulation to in turn influence the quality of final solutions.

Integrating Social and Cognitive Processes in Discovery and Innovation. Innovation and discovery involve individuals working successfully together in teams. Prior research has typically studied social teamwork variables in isolation or individual cognition variables in isolation. The current project examines a very large quantity of video data collected from a recent highly successful case of science and engineering, the Mars Exploration Rover. From this video record, the project traces the path from the structure of different subgroups (such as having formal roles and diversity of knowledge in the subgroups) to the occurrence of different social processes (such as task conflict, breadth of participation, communication norms, and shared mental models) to the occurrence of different cognitive processes (such as analogy, information search, and evaluation) and finally to outcomes (such as new methods for rover control and new hypotheses regarding the nature of Mars).

Advanced Analogical Search with Integrated Function and Form: The Verrocchio Project: Much research has shown that a major component of creative ideation is based on the incorporation of analogies in concept generation. The Verrocchio Project seeks to improve our capabilities in concept generation through collaboration between the disciplines of Cognitve Psychology, Computer Science, and Engineering Design to provide new tools for design by analogy. Our approach is based on a representation that associates functional and geometric information. We combine a linguistic search for functional similarity with a multi-level search for geometric similarity to automatically identify and present analogies to the designer. The initial application for the Verrocchio Project is the design of sustainable energy-using devices for developing world applications, a domain that is ripe for innovation. Our initial search space is the USPTO utility patent repository.