How do analogizing and mental simulation influence team dynamics in innovative product design?

2018

Urban Science

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Urban design is a complex problem-solving activity that commonly requires the aid of a variety of methods to support the process and enhance the quality of the outcomes. How to help designers with suitable methods to deal with ill-defined urban problems constitutes a major challenge in the urban design domain. In this regard, the use of urban design patterns is considered as a method that can contribute to urban design problem-solving. However, this tool was never investigated to understand its role in the task-related activities that take place during the design process by designers working in a team, and its influence on the creativity of the final design outcome as perceived by urban designers and students. Therefore, an empirical research based on a controlled experiment was carried out to explore the aid provided by design patterns during the conceptual stages of the process. Sixty-three master students working in teams of three were assigned a set of patterns to solve an urban design task. They were requested to use this material to produce as many creative conceptual solutions as possible. At the end of the sessions, they evaluated the creativity of their outcomes, and they completed a questionnaire about the aid afforded by the patterns. The solutions were also assessed by two independent urban designers. The study contributed to gain a better insight into the main design activities derived from the use of patterns as problem-solving tools and to unveil their contribution to urban design. The aid provided by the urban patterns was mainly concerned with task-related activities, and thereafter with team interactions. Overall, the use of patterns was seen to enhance the functionality of the design. Implications for design practice and design education are discussed.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Use of Patterns as an Urban Design Approach

2018

Urban Science

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“…Moreover, design experts extensively use knowledge from existing solution examples to create analogies with the problem at hand [42,43]. Whereas novices tend to organize problems that have superficial features in common, experts group problems that are related to solutions by similar principles [44].…”

Section: Tools and Resourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Design experience entails the capability of complementing and integrating divergent ideas and perspectives, including multidisciplinary knowledge and skills. The design literature discusses experience both in terms of the individual and his or her ability to work as a team [42]. When interacting with other team members, sharing individual knowledge affects not only the design outcomes produced, but also the coordination and communication of tasks, processes, and activities [55].…”

Section: Individual and Teamwork Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Insights from a Latent Semantic Analysis of Patterns in Design Expertise: Implications for Education

Singh

2019

Education Sciences

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Design and design thinking are increasingly being taught across several disciplines-ranging from arts, architecture, and technology and engineering to business schools-where expertise plays a central role. A substantial corpus of literature on research in regard to design expert and design expertise has accumulated in the last decades. However, in spite of its importance for design and design education, the topic has remained largely unframed. A major goal of this study was to carry out an assessment of literature through leading interdisciplinary design journals in order to identify main topics and categorize them into thematic patterns concerned with expertise in design. A structured assessment approach based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was used over 861 abstracts. The emerging thematic patterns associated with design expertise allowed a categorization at different levels of detail, which included 80, 50, 20, and 12 factors analyses, respectively. The major contribution of the study was to offer a structured assessment of key design literature that enabled to gain a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of the thematic patterns in the discussion on design expertise. Implications of the identified key factors for design education are discussed. Educ. Sci. 2019, 9, 208 2 of 23 task, especially as a comprehensive manual process. Typically, manual literature review involves a pre-selection of key articles that is often based on search criteria such as the number of citations of an article. This type of review approach, while insightful and quite common, is prone to be subjective and limiting in terms of the number of articles that can be covered. The potential tendency to focus on the more cited and influential papers might develop into a bias towards representative literature. In this study, we distinguish between critical review and the review of thematic patterns in the distribution and occurrence of the dominant themes in literature. Thus, instead of conducting a subjective evaluation regarding which themes are more important than others, a major goal of the present study is to use a semantic text analysis approach to carry out a quantitative and objective assessment to identify how the dominant themes appear across the corpus of assessed design literature. We would like to understand the main trends and topics associated with design expertise, and whether and how these can be organized and categorized into main thematic patterns. Eventually, understanding what topics relate to what kind of patterns, and at what level of detail may enable to gain a deeper understanding of what constitutes design expertise. A semantic analysis of existing literature can also provide further hints about what are the important issues that design students, educators, and practitioners should be aware of in regard to the development of expertise.The frequency and occurrence of themes will be assessed through semantic grouping of the keywords using techniques such as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), which is a text dat...

“…The ambiguity of these tools together with the variety of concepts that can be retrieved from metaphorical sources is what guides the architect to produce different interpretations of a problem [16]. Since architectural design is an activity that commonly requires teams working in collaboration, metaphorical reasoning can also enhance communicative interaction to integrate individual knowledge, and thus contribute to a shared understanding of the problem [24]. Metaphors generated during design interactions can be either generated from mental representations stored in the mind of the architect, or stimulated by external inspiration sources from different experiential domains of knowledge.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metaphors as Discourse Interaction Devices in Architectural Design

2019

Buildings

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Metaphor is a fundamental heuristic supporting cognitive and communicative requirements in design problem solving. This reasoning mechanism helps structure how architects reason about problems, and how they approach design situations from novel perspectives. This paper investigated empirically the use of metaphors during the conceptual front edge design, known as the most creative stage of the process. Figurative phenomena were analyzed in their original context of occurrence. Emerging metaphorical expressions generated during communication interactions maintained by sixty architects were identified and examined based on protocol analysis approach. Metaphors were further categorized according to main experiential domains at different levels of detail, as well as in terms of image and conceptual descriptions. The study contributed to gain a deeper insight into the rhetorical potential of metaphor during design problem solving, and to strengthen its centrality in architecture.