Using design strategies from microfluidic device patents to support idea generation.

Microfluidics has been an important method in providing answers to a wide variety of research questions in chemistry, biochemistry, and biology. Microfluidic designers benefit from instructional textbooks describing foundational principles and practices in developing microfluidic devices; however, these texts do not offer guidance about how to generate design concepts for microfluidic devices. Research on design in related fields, such as mechanical engineering, documents the difficulties engineers face when attempting to generate novel ideas. For microfluidic device designers, support during idea generation may lead to greater exploration of potential innovations in design. To investigate successful idea generation in microfluidics, we analyzed successful microfluidic US patents, selecting those with the key word "microfluidic" over a 2-year period. After analyzing the features and functions of 235 patents, we identified 36 distinct design strategies in microfluidic devices. We document each strategy, and demonstrate their usefulness in a concept generation study of practitioners in microfluidic design. While some of the identified design strategies may be familiar to microfluidic designers, exposure to this large set of strategies helped participants generate more diverse, creative, and unique microfluidic design concepts, which are considered best practices in idea generation.

From movement to thought: the development of executive function.

This article presents a very simple definition of executive functioning (EF). Although EF is traditionally understood as a cognitive function dependent upon top-down cortical control, we challenge this model. We propose that the functional architecture of the brain evolved to meet the needs of interactive behavior and that cognition develops to control the motor system, which is of paramount importance in adaptation, essentially a manifestation of EF. We propose that traditional models of cognition are incomplete characterizations of EF and that procedural learning and "automatic" behaviors are the most basic, bottom-up functions that support all EF. We propose that motor development in children demonstrates how all knowledge is grounded in sensorimotor interaction and how interactive behavior generates both procedural and declarative knowledge, which later interact to generate EF. This model emphasizes the critical importance of motor behavior in children and stresses the importance of the pediatric motor examination in understanding the development of EF. This model also has implications for why traditional tests of EF have little predictive validity in both children and adults.