CBDHS: A Case-Based Design Heuristics Tool to Support Product Design Students in Idea Generation

Previous research have demonstrated the efficiency of card-based design heuristics in product design courses, but the product case sources selected for these design heuristics have been too homogeneous and have targeted design goals, making it difficult for product design students to use them quickly and accurately in the classroom. As new products continue to iterate, previous design heuristics are no longer fully meeting the requirements of product design education. There is no process for developing design heuristics for course-targeted products that would allow design school teachers and students to develop new design heuristics on their own, based on course objectives. This study proposes case-based design heuristics (CBDHS) to support product design students in idea generation and a step-by-step process for constructing CBDHS. In addition, this study develops an eco-friendly product packaging example to validate the applicability of CBDHS in product design courses using an empirical evaluation. A total of 38 product design students participated in this quasi-experiment and were asked to generate as many ideas as possible in 45 min, with the experimental group (19 participants) generating ideas using CBDHS and the control group (19 participants) generating ideas using the brainstorming method. This quasi-experiment evaluated the ideas generated by each participant using five evaluation metrics (quantity, novelty, quality, number of good ideas, and level of design fixation). The results of the experiment show that (1) in terms of the number of ideas, the experimental group (M = 10.95, SD = 4.14) produced fewer ideas per participant on average than the control group (M = 13.68, SD = 4.44), t(36) = 1.966, p = 0.057; (2) regarding the novelty of ideas, there is no statistically significant difference between the control group (M = 4.00, SD = 1.47) and the experimental group (M = 4.48, SD = 1.56), t(149) = −1.928, p = 0.056; (3) with respect to the quality of ideas, there is no statistically significant difference between the control group (M = 4.19, SD = 1.96) and the experimental group (M = 4.40, SD = 2.05), t(149) = −0.648, p = 0.518; and (4) concerning the number of good ideas, there is a significant difference in the value of the proportion of the control group (9.5%) versus the experimental group (31.3%), x 2 (1, n = 151) = 11.44, p = 0.001. (5) There is no statistically significant difference between the experimental and control groups in terms of the level of design fixation. CBDHS can support product design students in generating ideas for the targeted products of the course, and the integration of CBDHS into the product design curriculum can help teachers to impart innovative ideas to students, ultimately leading to an improvement in teaching quality.