Grainger Graduate Assistant STEM Information Literacy Training

Fosmire and Radcliffe, Chapter 10 of Integrating Information into the Engineering Design Process. 

Masur and Larrimore Ouellette. Real-World Prior Art. Stanford Law Review.  Only opens on campus.  Skim, but do not read in depth. 

Shir, Sarhad. Is Your Invention Novel? The Issue of Prior Art. Intellectual Property in Academia. Read 2.2 and 2.5

Prior art refers to the preexisting knowledge and solutions on similar sets of design problems. In terms of patents, a primary requirement for patent award is that the design be demonstrably new and distinct from existing designs. Newness is demonstrated by identifying existing designs that align and then showing the innovation beyond those designs (hence citations being a fundamental part of patent applications.) Design teams should investigate prior art with the goal of casting the widest net possible, not just on topics with the closest or exact resemblance. Casting a wide net will offer advantages to design teams by enabling designers to see the bigger picture, understand the most prevalent solutions on the market, and identifying gaps where innovations are needed. Design teams should look at a wide variety of materials, such as handbooks, technical reports, standards, patents, industry journals, and scholarly articles. 

Handbooks

• A reference book focusing on a variety of information from various sources within a given field or subject. These books can focus on core concepts or data about the given subject, and are usually written for the professional. 
• Scholars reviewing handbooks and other books should gain familiarity with scanning the table of contents and indices of these books to find subject headings that are relevant to the research they are conducting. 

Encyclopedias

• Reference books that provide a wide overview of a given topic. These books are geared towards novice learners to help them gain an idea of what the topic is about. 

Scholarly Journal Articles

• Formal material on a research project written for experts by experts in a given field, and have gone through the peer-review process. They will consist of an abstract summarizing the research and findings; a narrative review of the context and literature their research exists within; a section defining their methodology; a section discussing their findings; and a section looking towards the future on this topic.  
• Bibliographies of scholarly articles are useful to scan to find similar helpful articles. 

Conference Proceedings

• The written record of a conference, symposium or other meeting sponsored by a society or association in a given field. 
• Design teams should work with librarians to identify conferences that are relevant to their design project. 

Standards

• A document developed by experts in a field that sets the requirements, specifications, or guidelines to follow to ensure that an design is reproducible, safe, and interoperable. 
• Standards use a jargon and naming convention that can make them difficult to find, so it is best to start a standards search in web store if you don't know the standard's name. Additionally, design teams should check with stakeholders, as they will be aware of what standards or compliance needs the team will need to meet. 

Technical Reports

• Documents that are usually published by organizations like government organizations or university departments. These documents report on the test findings of a research project, and are often not peer reviewed. 
• These documents are useful for design teams to know about, as they are one of the fastest published documents that contain the newest information in a field. 

Patents

• A government licensing on the exclusive right of commercialization to an invention, for a set time period. These documents usually contain legal language and technical drawings.
• Patent literature will not appear in a usual literature search, and will leave a hole in the literature review if not looked for. They're useful for a literature review for their technical summaries. However, because of the legal language used in patent documentation and searching, they can be difficult to find. 

Trade Literature

• In this case, trade literature refers to the popular literature produced by manufacturers and companies about the products they produce. Trade literature is best utilized as inspiration for developing searches and looking at the formal literature in new ways. Trade literature also allows designers to see the progression of innovation in an area over time. 

Planning to Gather Information

It's important that engineers know to try and generate the broadest selection of potential solutions to their design problems. Instead of focusing on one type of solution and digging deep, they should look at multiple types of solutions and view broadly. Thinking this way allows for designers to discover and utilize a richer pool of solutions, even if some are more viable than others. This is important because it forces designers to think outside of the box that they know of. 

There are several methods that a team can use to brainstorm in preparation of their search for prior art, and importantly do so systematically. 

Attribute listing can be used if a team wants to break down their design problem into it's components and address each separately. For example, if a team is attempting to design a bicycle, they may list out the materials needed for the wheels, the seat, and so on. 

Case-based reasoning is a technique that focuses on searching for similar problems, as it reasons that similar problems can be solved with similar solutions. In the case of this technique, novice designers need to understand that looking for similar problems does not mean they will find problems exactly like theirs. If trying to develop a shear a specific breed of alpaca, you may want to look at shears for other types of animals with unique wool, not just that breed of alpaca.

Lateral thinking challenges designers by presenting designers with a radical statement about their design project or possible solution to force them to think about the project in a different way. This process typically involves brainstorming techniques like mind mapping to expand upon the radical statement about project or solution.

Card based tools like an ideation deck, in which the design team creates a project specific deck to visually display how aspects of the project will interact with each other may also be useful to get researchers to think outside of the box. 

These brainstorming techniques will help designers see components of their design process in a different light, and how they interact with each other. This is important for the designer, as it will help guide them in understanding where they need to search for new knowledge, and what types of knowledge they are looking for. They can, then, move into searching and collecting the literature.

Collecting and Assessing the Literature

Collecting the literature involves developing and utilizing search strategies (as seen from Session 3) and organizing the information gathered. 

Citation managers like Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote offer ways for designers to collect and organize information as they search. They offer useful features such as downloading articles saved and some, like Zotero, offer free ways to share within teams. 

Design teams typically divide specific parts of gathering prior art amongst team members, and need to come together and disseminate the information they've gathered amongst the team as a part of developing their design. This works twofold as a way for members of the team to assess information gathered for its use and see how the information gathered by individual team members fits together. 

Designers should present the information gathered in quick summaries, like an elevator pitch. They should be able to answer questions like:

•  What did you read?
• Who created the information?
• What makes this information credible?
• How can it be used for the design process?
• Should your team members also read this?
• Does this item show a need for further information?

Ultimately, the goal is for the design team to understand the document being presented, how it applies to their design, and if it is of use. An activity of presenting the information found can either be done in class as an activity or by the group in their own time.