Impacting designer creativity through IT-enabled concept generation

One of the innovation's fundamental mechanisms, designer creativity, is both unsupported by rigorous information-technology-enabled tools and uncharacterized as a scientific phenomenon. In this paper, we present VISUALIZEIT-a project seeking to identify a scientific basis and develop the supporting cyberinfrastructure needed to facilitate, evaluate, and disseminate information-technology-enabled innovation methodologies that augment designer creativity. This particular research paper describes a method of synthesizing concept representations through the development and expansion of platforms focused on computational concept generation, clustering of design concepts, a repository of archived design knowledge, and an information integration and representation interface. We also present the initial results from implementing VISUALIZEIT using two populations of students.