Meaning, Concept, and Design Thinking: The Implication of Symbolic Interactionism for Design Education

Meaning of Gaze Behaviors in Individuals' Perception and Interpretation of Commercial Interior Environments: An Experimental Phenomenology Approach Involving Eye-Tracking

“…The symbolic interaction framework is suited to this study, as its holistic view concerns the meaning of humanhuman and human-environment interactions, which is essential to research on spatial experience. The sequence of interview questions was derived from prior studies adopting symbolic interaction approaches to research on meanings of interior environments (Kwon, 2010(Kwon, , 2016. The questionnaire also included questions about the experience of participants of the eye-tracking experiment setup and procedures at the end.…”

“…The traditional design approach to understanding human perception has focused on the vision as the dominant human sense for acquiring information from the external environment. However, more recent design research presupposes that visual perception is part of spatial experience associated with emotions and feelings triggered by environmental attributes (Kwon, 2010(Kwon, , 2016Lisińska-Kuśnierz and Krupa, 2020).…”

Nebulous, Abstract, Elusive: Examining Design Concepts Within Interiors Practice and Pedagogy

“…While the value of utilizing concepts has been broadly accepted, there are few topics that give rise to as much confusion. This is an especially persistent issue within interior design education where instructors struggle to teach (Kwon, 2016;Travis, 2011), and students sometimes fail to grasp (Anderson & Travis, 2018;Eilouti, 2020; Rengel, 2014), what exactly design concepts are and how to best generate and utilize them.Notoriously abstract and hard to pin down, limited research has been conducted to adequately examine or articulate the complexities of conceptual thinking within interior design (Travis, 2011). While existing literature may provide guidance on the utilization of design concepts…”

“…While the value of utilizing concepts has been broadly accepted, there are few topics that give rise to as much confusion. This is an especially persistent issue within interior design education where instructors struggle to teach (Kwon, 2016; Travis, 2011), and students sometimes fail to grasp (Anderson & Travis, 2018; Eilouti, 2020; Rengel, 2014), what exactly design concepts are and how to best generate and utilize them.…”

“…Notoriously abstract and hard to pin down, limited research has been conducted to adequately examine or articulate the complexities of conceptual thinking within interior design (Travis, 2011). While existing literature may provide guidance on the utilization of design concepts (Anderson & Travis, 2018; Eilouti, 2020, 2021; Kwon, 2016; Lola, 2020; Taura & Nagai, 2013; Travis, 2011), available sources rarely address the underlying assumptions that inform individual approaches to conceptual development. In an effort to address this issue, a literature review was conducted and a mixed-methods, qualitative study was devised to capture insights from an international group of interior design students, educators, and practitioners in five cities—Toronto, Canada; New York, US; London, England; Glasgow, Scotland; and Berlin, Germany—and within seven institutions—Toronto Metropolitan University, The New School/Parsons School of Design, Fashion Institute of Technology, London Metropolitan University, Royal College of Art, Glasgow School of Art, and Berlin International University of Applied Sciences—between September 2019 and March 2020.…”