Conceptual Blending: Cultural Referencing for Innovation

When design is left to it’s own, it’s as if leaving a musician in a sealed room. But not with mechanisms for blending external stimulus? Correct.

Design when left to its own devices has the choice to focus on the purely mechanical capabilities of function to determine it’s output or the relative nature of temporal and physical form to content with. But when the factor of archetype and cultural blending is implemented a whole other form of innovation is experienced.

In A Case Study On Design With Conceptual Blending several tools are defined and their application to allow design to take it’s place and build upon cultural references thus producing a conceptual blending output that further aligns itself with the values of users and well as those guided by the archetypes the cultural underpinnings evoke. End result: value. 

                                

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Design Repositories – Engineering Inspiration

When the mechanism for innovation is the mother of invention there are only a few ways that the purpose for this innovation takes place. Is there a way to increase that? Yes, and here’s how.

As defined in The Development Of A Repository Of InnovativeProducts For Inspiration In Engineering Design the possibilities of function subtraction and the utility of innovating functions are carefully weighed. What is found?

Both are required to continue to improve the value of products. But what happens when a toothbrush is enabled with Bluetooth and can speak to you and understand your interactions with it? Then what? This is the value of design repositories used for the engineering purpose of further enabling the inspiration cycle so necessary in the lives of engineers and designers not only for the motivation but also for the continued development of the art of their efforts. It is these tools as described above that give engineers and designers the drive to push forward. 

                               

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Breaking the Design Fixation – It’s all in the Innovation Flow

Limitations are the basis for all finalized & developed output: engineering and economics cannot be ignored. But what about when this is exactly what you must avoid?  Here’s how.

As fully and perfectly detailed in Examining Design Fixation In Engineering Idea Generation: The Role Of Example Modality we see the basis of limitations placed on designers and engineers when R&D for new product development efforts are taking place. The limitations for this are therefore initially visual and quickly become functional based on the capability of the mechanisms used to produce said designs with the final limitations being placed by the economic ramifications of the manufacturing process.

What be comes apparent is the mechanisms and mentalities of the views that that the designers hold when the initial investigations of the typologies to be investigated are completed. Simply, what you see is the 1^st limitation of the possible domains that you might investigate. By removing limitations from the 1^st instances, the expectations become limitless and innovation is able to flow freely. Value is then a byproduct that cannot be ignored when breakthroughs are realized.

                                

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