Trial on Design Ideation by Systematic Presentation of Contradictory Concepts

Abstract

A method of design ideation by using concept dictionaries is proposed in which subjects are systematically presented with pairs of concepts and generate ideas based on them. An experiment about “coming up with novel ideas by using presented antonyms or synonyms” is conducted. The results show that ideas inspired by direct antonyms tend to be better than those by indirect antonyms or synonyms. On the other hand, part-of-speech to describe concepts doesn’t have an influence on ideas’ quality.