A systematic review of protocol studies on conceptual design cognition

This paper reports the first systematic review and synthesis of protocol studies on conceptual design cognition. 47 protocol studies from the domains of architectural design, engineering design, and product de-sign engineering were reviewed towards answering the following re-search question: What is our current understanding of the cognitive processes involved in conceptual design tasks carried out by individual designers? Studies were found to reflect three viewpoints on the cognitive nature of designing, namely: design as search; design as ex-ploration; and design activities. Synthesising the findings of individual studies yielded a classification of cognitive processes involved in con-ceptual design tasks, described in different terms across different viewpoints. Towards a common terminology, these processes are posi-tioned within the cognitive psychology literature, revealing seven basic types of process that appear to be fundamental to designing across all viewpoints: memory (working and long term); visual perception; men-tal imagery; attention; semantic association; cognitive control; and higher-order processes, e.g. analysis and reasoning. The development of common cognitive models of conceptual design, grounded in a sci-entifically rigorous understanding of design cognition, is identified as an avenue for future research

Reducing Information To Stimulate Design Imagination

This paper describes an experiment that is part of a larger research project that compares the visual reasoning between groups of designers and non-designers. In particular, this experiment focuses on how designers’ processes of reasoning is characterized when they are given different levels of reduced information of an object in comparison to a group of non-designers. The experiment used deconstructed and scaled-down components of Gerrit Riedveld’s iconic Red and Blue Chair (1918). Three groups were given 3 different levels of information - group 1 were given components painted the same color as the original chair, group 2 were given components painted in a single (white) color, and group 3 were given unpainted (natural) components. The results suggest that the 3 levels of reduced information impacted on the designers’ reasoning processes and there were clear differences in the visual reasoning processes between design and non-design participants