Yang pointed out that approximately 70 percent of the cost of a design is spent in the first 30 percent of the design cycle. “The choices you make, the ideas you generate, really constrain what you can do later on in terms of cost and also resources that impact your design,” she said.
Yang studied how building physical prototypes, computer-aided design (CAD) and sketching all compare with respect to the performance of the final product.
“Sketching, particularly dimension sketching early on, makes a big impact on design outcome verses sketching later,” Yang explained. “Making prototypes is very crucial to the process, but creating simple prototypes means a better outcome in the end. Getting feedback on prototypes and sketches matter a lot.”
Yang also suggests designers look for where users are having problems when they work with a product. These “pain points” as she calls them are typically important areas for optimization and innovation.
Ultimately, Yang’s interests lay with how engineers tackle the early concept phase in a product’s development cycle.
“People’s strategies are so fascinating,” she said. “We observe them and try to understand what their thought process is. Do different approaches work better than others? It’s not easy to change people, but if we give them better tools or processes, they can design better.”
Yang created MIT’s Ideation Lab to help engineers, designers, planners and architects improve their imagination based on their activities. The lab has helped bring to life various projects including infrastructure for residential solar power, space systems and software design.
Currently, NASA, Ferrari and IBM have all begun implementing Yang’s research.
Yang invites design engineers in the Boston area to her design lab to perform tasks using several design tools such as sketching, CAD and foam prototypes. She then records the designer’s performance in each task and takes the final designs to a crowdsourced panel to assess how user friendly the products are.
Yang’s findings suggest that “with fast, lower-fidelity methods, like foam and sketching, people came up with more ideas — there’s a higher volume.”
As a result, she suggests that quantity is often more important than the quality of the initial designs. Therefore, it might be in the designer’s best interests to write all their ideas down, draw what ever comes to mind and work from there through many iterations.
“If I have a room of 20 people with the same design problem, say a new kind of coffee cup for commuters, I can guarantee you that most of those 20 people will come up with many of the same first five ideas,” Yang explained. “Once you get past 10, 20, 100 ideas — those are ideas that have not been farmed before. So you just want to get your motor running.”
To learn more about design, check out the MIT OPENCOURSEWARE Introduction to Design.