Helping students to find biological inspiration: Impact of valuableness and presentation format

Analogy and bioinspired design have demonstrated applicability as effective tools for innovation, but they can be very difficult to implement. One challenge faced by students and other novice designers is their lack of knowledge to base analogies on. This challenge is also faced by engineers making distant-domain analogies to biology. Other open research questions surround effective strategies for students attempting to implement analogies. When students seek analogies should potential analogues be presented one at a time or should multiple analogues be presented simultaneously (presentation format)? This study implements a 2×2 between-subject factorial design to further explore the impact of presentation format and students´ perceived valuableness of passages. Impact is measured in terms of the quality, novelty, and variety of ideas generated. Two additional control conditions were also included, one with no passages and another with random passages. The results from this study have shown that quality is significantly affected by valuableness of passages, novelty is not affected by any factor, and variety is significantly affected by both factors.