How engineering teams select design concepts: A view through the lens of creativity

While concept selection is recognized as a crucial component of the engineering design process, little is known about how concepts are selected during this process or what factors affect the selection of creative concepts. To fill this void, content analysis was performed on student engineering design team discussions during a concept selection task. Our results indicate that student design teams typically focus on the technical feasibility of concepts during the selection process. However, teams that identified useful elements of ideas or continued to generate new ideas during this process had a tendency towards selecting creative ideas. These results add to our understanding of team-based decision-making during concept selection and highlight the need for encouraging creativity throughout the concept selection process.