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

Abstract

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...

Semantic-Based Classification of Long Texts on Higher Education in China

“…Various accurate text mining models have emerged, including convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) model [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. However, these traditional classification models cannot be directly used for training and applying directly to process the HE files because the HE files are much longer and richer in contents, and the whole HE dataset is more imbalanced than common social network texts (e.g., Tweets) [13].…”