Designing as Construction of Representations: A Dynamic Viewpoint in Cognitive Design Research

This article presents a cognitively oriented viewpoint on design. It focuses on cognitive, dynamic aspects of real design, i.e., the actual cognitive activity implemented by designers during their work on professional design projects. Rather than conceiving de-signing as problem solving - Simon's symbolic information processing (SIP) approach - or as a reflective practice or some other form of situated activity - the situativity (SIT) approach - we consider that, from a cognitive viewpoint, designing is most appropriately characterised as a construction of representations. After a critical discussion of the SIP and SIT approaches to design, we present our view-point. This presentation concerns the evolving nature of representations regarding levels of abstraction and degrees of precision, the function of external representations, and specific qualities of representation in collective design. Designing is described at three levels: the organisation of the activity, its strategies, and its design-representation construction activities (different ways to generate, trans-form, and evaluate representations). Even if we adopt a "generic design" stance, we claim that design can take different forms depending on the nature of the artefact, and we propose some candidates for dimensions that allow a distinction to be made between these forms of design. We discuss the potential specificity of HCI design, and the lack of cognitive design research occupied with the quality of design. We close our discussion of representational structures and activities by an outline of some directions regarding their functional linkages

Design: One, but in different forms

This overview paper defends an augmented cognitively oriented generic-design hypothesis: there are both significant similarities between the design activities implemented in different situations and crucial differences between these and other cognitive activities; yet, characteristics of a design situation (related to the design process, the designers, and the artefact) introduce specificities in the corresponding cognitive activities and structures that are used, and in the resulting designs. We thus augment the classical generic-design hypothesis with that of different forms of designing. We review the data available in the cognitive design research literature and propose a series of candidates underlying such forms of design, outlining a number of directions requiring further elaboration

Both Generic Design and Different Forms of Designing

This paper defends an augmented cognitively oriented "generic-design hypothesis": There are both significant similarities between the design activities implemented in different situations and crucial differences between these and other cognitive activities; yet, characteristics of a design situation (i.e., related to the designers, the artefact, and other task variables influencing these two) introduce specificities in the corresponding design activities and cognitive structures that are used. We thus combine the generic-design hypothesis with that of different "forms" of designing. In this paper, outlining a number of directions that need further elaboration, we propose a series of candidate dimensions underlying such forms of design

Design activities: how to analyze cognitive effort associated to cognitive treatments?

Working memory issues are important in many real activities. Thus, measuring cognitive effort (or mental load) has been a main research topic for years in cognitive ergonomics, though no consensual method to study such aspect has been proposed. In addition, we argue that cognitive effort has to be related to an analysis of the evolution of cognitive processes, which has been called "time processing". Towards this end, we present and discuss paradigms that have been used for years to study writing activities and, in experiments reported in this paper, for studying design activities, such as computer-graphic tasks or web site desig

Distributed situation awareness in dynamic systems: Theoretical development and application of an ergonomics methodology

The purpose of this paper is to propose foundations for a theory of situation awareness based on the analysis of interactions between agents (i.e., both human and non-human) in subsystems. This approach may help promote a better understanding of technology-mediated interaction in systems, as well as helping in the formulation of hypotheses and predictions concerning distributed situation awareness. It is proposed that agents within a system each hold their own situation awareness which may be very different from (although compatible with) other agents. It is argued that we should not always hope for, or indeed want, sharing of this awareness, as different system agents have different purposes. This view marks situation awareness as a 1 dynamic and collaborative process that binds agents together on tasks on a moment-by-moment basis. Implications of this viewpoint for development of a new theory of, and accompanying methodology for, distributed situation awareness are offered

Resilience markers for safer systems and organisations

If computer systems are to be designed to foster resilient performance it is important to be able to identify contributors to resilience. The emerging practice of Resilience Engineering has identified that people are still a primary source of resilience, and that the design of distributed systems should provide ways of helping people and organisations to cope with complexity. Although resilience has been identified as a desired property, researchers and practitioners do not have a clear understanding of what manifestations of resilience look like. This paper discusses some examples of strategies that people can adopt that improve the resilience of a system. Critically, analysis reveals that the generation of these strategies is only possible if the system facilitates them. As an example, this paper discusses practices, such as reflection, that are known to encourage resilient behavior in people. Reflection allows systems to better prepare for oncoming demands. We show that contributors to the practice of reflection manifest themselves at different levels of abstraction: from individual strategies to practices in, for example, control room environments. The analysis of interaction at these levels enables resilient properties of a system to be ‘seen’, so that systems can be designed to explicitly support them. We then present an analysis of resilience at an organisational level within the nuclear domain. This highlights some of the challenges facing the Resilience Engineering approach and the need for using a collective language to articulate knowledge of resilient practices across domains

An experimental investigation on the relationship between perceived assembly complexity and product design complexity

Complexity is one of the main drivers inducing increased assembly cost, operational issues and increased lead time for product realisation, and continues to pose challenges to manual assembly operations. In the literature, assembly complexity is widely viewed from both objective and subjective perspectives. The objective perspective relates complexity directly to the characteristics of a process without accounting the characteristics of performers, whereas, subjective perspective considers complexity as a conjunction between process and performer characteristics. This article aims to investigate the link between perceived assembly complexity and product complexity by providing a prediction model relying on a series of natural experiments. In these experiments, the participants were asked to assemble a series of ball-and-stick models with varying degree of product complexity based on a clear 2D assembly work instruction. Complexity of each model was objectively estimated by considering structural properties associated with handling and insertion of assembly parts and their connectivity pattern. Moreover, perceived complexity is approached based on the subjective interpretations of the participants on the difficulty associated with the assembly operation of each model. The results showed that product complexity and assembly time is super-linearly correlated; an increase in the product complexity is accompanied with an increase in assembly time, rework rate and human errors. Moreover, a sigmoid curve is proposed for the relationship between perceived assembly complexity and product complexity indicating that human workers start to perceive assembly operation of a particular product as complex if the product complexity reaches a critical threshold which can vary among individuals with different skill sets, experience, training levels and assembly preferences