Assessing the variety of a concept space using an unbiased estimate of Rao’s quadratic index

Abstract Past research relates design creativity to “divergent thinking,” i.e., how well the concept space is explored during the early phase of design. Researchers have argued that generating several concepts would increase the chances of producing better design solutions. “Variety” is one of the parameters by which one can quantify the breadth of a concept space explored by the designers. It is useful to assess variety at the conceptual design stage because, at this stage, designers have the freedom to explore different solution principles so as to satisfy a design problem with substantially novel concepts. This article elaborates on and critically examines the existing variety metrics from the engineering design literature, discussing their limitations. A new distance-based variety metric is proposed, along with a prescriptive framework to support the assessment process. The framework measures the real-valued distance between two design concepts using any chosen representation of their underlying abstraction levels. The proposed framework is implemented in a software tool called “VariAnT.” Furthermore, the tool’s application is demonstrated through an illustrative example.