Reading Responses

Designing Sustainability. Agogino
The focus of the Design for Sustainability course was on innovation processes for sustainable products. The course constituted of students from the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), the National University of Mexico (UNAM), and the California College of the Arts (CCA). This course not only allowed students to engage in a project to be aware of and focus on the global perspective of sustainability, but also allowed students to work in multidisciplinary teams. In addition, the three-semester product development program enabled students to further develop their solutions to market. In most cases, I see that projects that students propose or has concocted ends as the course ends. To have a course which enables students to involve in multidisciplinary teams and establish their projects into a business is an excellent learning experience.


Metrics for Measuring Ideation Effectiveness. Shah, et al
How do you measure, or why do you measure the effectiveness of an ideation? It was very intriguing to see how the author scientifically categorized the important factors of measuring an ideation. Four separate effectiveness measures proposed were novelty, variety, quality and quantity of the ideas. Despite the fact that the author delved into a unique topic to investigate, the over all measuring of creativity methods were hard to comprehend. I thought it was frustrating and restricting. I began to wonder if these measuring methods were necessary. Shouldn't ideas be open as possible?

Creativity as a Design Criterion. Christiaans
“Although the judging of designs is daily practice in real life, playing an important role in decisions about production and in the awarding of prizes, no controlled experiments have been found to confirm this assumption.”

Controlled experiments were conducted to determine creativity as a design criterion. However, the end result divulges that the validity of the creativity measurement is very difficult and questionable. The judgments by people with different levels of design expertise contradict to those with homogeneous group of judges. I could see the varying results due to different level of agreement and involvement of the judges.