Reading Responses

Designing Sustainability, Agogino
As discussed in class, different cultures have different demands and applying these experiences can result in innovative solutions that are true to the users’ needs. A cross disciplinary and cultural course, as mentioned in the reading, allow students to “acquire a global vision on sustainability”. Furthermore, it teaches them the value of using each other resources and experience into a common goal. In fact, as seen in the course analysis, language was not a barrier to communication. However, the inability to understand the design mission from the beginning led the team members into disagreements.

Metrics for Measuring Ideation Effectiveness, Shah, et al.
Even though the author had an interesting approach on sub categorizing the ideation process, I thought to be very limiting and contradictory. As a design student, I believe that coming with the initial ideas should be as open as possible. Many of the design that comes from ideation are not meant to be the final design but the beginning to an innovative solution. Therefore, trying to measure “the technical feasibility” or counting if the same idea appeared multiple times seems too restricting.

Creativity as a Design Criterion, Christiaans.
Being the idea of defining “creativity” highly subjective, the author tries to create a measuring system by comparing opinions from professionals within the field of design and from people with no expertise in the area. I thought interesting the study of “creativity” by associating its value to “attractiveness” and “prototypical”. The results from the experiments show that the attractiveness has a high value to creativity among groups with design experience. On the other hand, groups with little or no design experience perceive the prototypical with more significant value. However, the author concludes that the measurement of creativity remains subjective. People have their own understanding of “creativity” influenced by their own experience, background, and emotion.