Use of opposite-relation lexical stimuli in concept generation

Design description and modeling is widely performed using form-independent functions represented by words in the lexical category of verbs. We have been studying the use of lexical, or word, stimuli in generating design concepts. In this paper, we describe an experiment where participants were provided with problems and stimulus sets consisting of verbs with meanings similar to and opposite to the functional requirements. For all problems, participants were observed to select opposite terms despite their less apparent connection to the problem, even though similar, more obvious terms were present. Results suggest a possible increase in concept novelty when using opposite terms.