THE COMBINATOR: A COMPUTER-BASED TOOL FOR IDEA GENERATION
DS 84: Proceedings of the DESIGN 2016 14th International Design Conference
                        Year: 2016
                        Editor: Marjanovic Dorian, Storga Mario, Pavkovic Neven, Bojcetic Nenad, Skec Stanko
                        Author: Han, J.; Shi, F.; Childs, P. R. N.
                        Series: DESIGN
                        Section: DESIGN SUPPORT TOOLS
                        Page(s): 639-648
                        
Abstract
Idea generation is important in design, but coming up with new and creative ideas is often challenging. The paper presents a computer-based tool named the Combinator for assisting designers to generate creative ideas. The tool is capable to generate combinational ideas based on combinational creativity theory. The Combinator has been indicated to be beneficial in helping designers generate useful and creative ideas through a case study. The result indicates that the Combinator can increase better ideas occurrence, improve design success rate, expand design space, and enhance design space exploration.
Keywords: design, creativity, idea generation, combinational creativity, creativity tools