Studying Designers‘05 Studying Designers’05 Preprints of the International Workshop on Studying Designers‘05 University of Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France 17-18 October 2005 edited by John S Gero Nathalie Bonnardel International Workshop on Studying Designers‘05 University of Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France 17-18 October 2005 ISBN 1 86487 743 X 2005 PUBLISHED BY Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Email: [email protected] TABLE OF CONTENTS vii Preface SESSION ONE 1 Reasoning by reference to past designs 3 C. Eckert, M. Stacey & C.F. Earl Evocation of new ideas in creative design 21 N. Bonnardel & E. Marmèche Differentiation: Designers are more than being adept at designing 33 M. Suwa The capture of design eureka 39 Y.-C. Chiang & M.-H. Wang SESSION TWO 55 Ethical aspects of the product design process 57 P. Lloyd, W. van der Hoog & I. van de Poel Dual protocol analysis based on design information and design process 71 Y. S. Kim, S. T. Jin & H. S. Lee The nature of creativity in design 87 H. Casakin & S. Kreitler A cognitive model of the engineering design mind 101 J. S. Elias & S. Dasgupta 117 SESSION THREE Visual reasoning in the design process 119 H.-H. Tang & L.H. Tsai Software authors as designers 129 A. Woodcock Does sketching off-load visuo-spatial working memory? 145 Z. Bilda & J. S. Gero A role for external representations in architectural design 161 F. Decortis, S. Safin & P. Leclercq 179 SESSION FOUR A diary study in the engineering domain 181 P. J. Wild, C. McMahon, S. Culley,M. Darlington & F. Liu A framework for experimental laboratory design experiments 197 D. Choulier & E. Pena Content-based design analysis 213 P. Saariluoma, K. Nevala & M. Karvinen Entropy measurement of linkography in protocol studies of designing 229 J. WT Kan & J. S. Gero SESSION FIVE 247 Individual designing behavior and learning style: Investigation of the design 249 process of interior design students S. Bar-Eli Usage of methods in student projects 267 S. Schneider & U. Lindemann Exploring the everyday designer 277 R. Wakkary Studying outstanding designers 283 N. Cross & B. Lawson 289 SESSION SIX Studying design collaboration in virtual environments 291 M. L. Maher, Z. Bilda and F. Gul & D. Marchant An ethnographically oriented study of designers in a collaborative design project 307 S. Joel, M. Smyth & P. Rodgers Cognitive studies in similarity assessment 323 J. R. Jupp & J. S. Gero 333 SESSION SEVEN Espoused theory and theory-in-use: Denys Lasdun's design credo 335 G. Goldschmidt Accidental resource 343 A. Heylighen, W. M. Martin,& H. Cavallin The semiotics of product aesthetics 351 N. Crilly & P. J. Clarkson Implications of metacognition in design 349 J. Jänsch & H. Birkhofer Critical points for change 355 P. Parthenios Modelling technology enhanced learning environments through designers 361 observations M. de Grassi, A. Giretti & M. Mengoni Exploring the effects of introducing real-time simulation on collaborative urban 369 design in augmented reality S. Attfield, C. Mottram, A. F. G. Schiek, A. Blandford & A. Penn Architecture design intelligences 375 N. D'Souza CONTACT AUTHORS EMAIL ADDRESSES 383 AUTHOR INDEX 385 vii PREFACE The purpose of this workshop is to advance our understanding of designing as an activity, i.e. how professional designers, students in design or even lay- persons create and develop the representation of an artefact that is both new and adapted to a given context. Studying human designers can be carried out in many ways ranging from experiments in laboratories with individual designers, experiments in laboratories with design teams, to in-situ studies of individuals and teams. The experiments can be concerned with elaborating aspects of the acts of designing or of changing the design environment. The latter is generally concerned with the introduction of various forms of computational and communication technologies. Many of these are represented in the papers in this volume. This volume presents the preprints of the International Workshop on Studying Designers’05.The issues addressed are what are the cognitive processes involved in design activities? Especially, what is the role of past experience and knowledge, and how are they integrated in order to design a new product? • How can we understand creativity in design? • What is the role of design representations and visual reasoning in designers' activities? • What is the role of collaboration in performing design activities? • What methods are useful for studying designers' activities? • How can we teach students to become designers? • What is expertise in design? The papers were selected from the submissions by two referees. The financial support of the University of Provence is gratefully acknowledged as is the infrastructure support of the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition of the University of Sydney in organizing this workshop. Mercèdes Paulini worked hard to produce a coherently formatted volume. John Gero and Nathalie Bonnardel Sydney and Aix-en-Provence October 2005 viii SESSION ONE Reasoning by reference to past designs C. Eckert & M. Stacey Evocation of new ideas in creative design N. Bonnardel & E. Marmèche Differentiation: Designers are more than being adept at designing M. Suwa The capture of design eureka Y.-C. Chiang & M.-H. Wang JS Gero and N Bonnardel (eds), Studying Designers’05, 2005 Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney, pp 3-19 REFERENCES TO PAST DESIGNS CLAUDIA ECKERT University of Cambridge, UK MARTIN STACEY De Montfort University, UK and CHRISTOPHER EARL The Open University, UK Abstract. Designing by adaptation is almost invariably a dominant feature of designing, and references to past designs are ubiquitous in design discourse. Object references serve as indices into designers’ stocks of design concepts, in which memories for concrete embodiments and exemplars are tightly bound to solution principles. Thinking and talking by reference to past designs serves as a way to reduce the overwhelming complexity of complex design tasks by enabling designers to use parsimonious mental representations to which details can be added as needed. However object references can be ambiguous, and import more of the past design than is intended or may be desirable. 1. Introduction: Designing by adaptation Designers hardly ever start from scratch, but design by modifying existing products. Complex products such as aircraft or jet engines evolve from generation to generation, often over decades, through the transfer and revision of design elements. This transfer of design elements takes place at different levels of abstraction ranging from general solution principles to details of component manufacture. There are sound economic reasons for reusing components and subsystems in designs, as well as approaches and solution principles. Reusing parts and tooling makes a new design cheaper. Components that have been tested and certified do not have to be recertified. The closer the new design is to an old design, the easier it is to predict, and reduce the risks of, particular failure modes over the lifecycle of the design. Within the 4 C.M. ECKERT, M.K. STACEY AND C.F. EARL design process, uncertainties and risks vary from high risks associated with innovative parts to low risks associated with parts with similar functional specifications reused from other products. It is easier to plan a design process when innovation is limited to some part of the product, and with other parts adapted to new needs. Design processes themselves also have parts which are adaptations of previous processes especially for similar product parts and subsystems. Again planning is easier when innovative and potentially more risky processes are limited to part of a product or to a particular process activity. However, the use of existing solutions goes far deeper than product and process characteristics to the way in which designers reason about a new design. Reasoning by similarity and analogy is a central part of human cognition (see for instance Holyoak and Thagard 1995), and designing by analogy enables designers to cope with the otherwise overwhelming complexity of design tasks. Memories and external records of previous designs are primary sources for the elements of new designs. References to them provide concise indices to design knowledge; these indices are easy to communicate in discussions. But as representations of previous designs comprise tight linkages between function, behaviour and structure they also constrain designers in conceptualizing and developing design alternatives. 2. References to past designs are ubiquitous in engineering design References to existing objects are ubiquitous in design processes and can be used in many different roles. Designers refer to entire objects, parts of them or even groups of objects at once. This section reports on different functions we have identified from several empirical studies but illustrated with examples from one of these, namely diesel engine design for off-road vehicles. 2.1. EMPIRICAL STUDIES Since 1999 the first author and members of the Engineering Design Centre at Cambridge University have carried out several detailed studies in engineering design companies to understand communication between design teams, planning design processes in industry and the effects of changing parts in existing products (Eckert, Clarkson and Zanker 2004; Eckert and Clarkson 2003 ). Overall nearly 100 engineers and engineering managers in seven