Protocol Analysis in Engineering Design Education Research: Observations,
                        Limitations, and Opportunities

Early phases of the design process require designers to select into view elements of the problem that they deem important. This exploration process is commonly referred to as problem framing and is essential to solution generation. There have recently been calls in the literature for more precise representations of framing activity and how individual designers come to negotiate shared frames in team settings. This paper presents a novel research approach to understand design framing activity using a system thinking lens. Systems thinking is the way that we understand a system’s components and the interrelations to create interventions, which can be used to move the system outcomes in a more favorable direction. The proposed approach is based on the observation that systems as mental representations of the problem bear some similarity to frames as collections of concepts implicit in the designer’s cognition. Systems mapping – a common visualization tool used to facilitate systems thinking – could then be used to model external representations of framing, made explicit through speech, and sketches. We thus adapt systems mapping to develop a coding scheme to analyze verbal protocols of design activity to retrospectively represent framing activity. The coding scheme is applied on two distinct datasets. The resulting system maps are analyzed to highlight team problem frames, individual contributions, and how the framing activity evolves over time. This approach is well suited to visualize the framing activity that occurs in open-ended problem contexts, where designers are more focused on problem finding and analysis rather than concept generation and detailed design. Several future research avenues for which this approach could be used or extended, including using new computational methods, are presented.

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Protocol Analysis in Engineering Design Education Research: Observations, Limitations, and Opportunities

Cited by 4 publications

References 49 publications

A Systems Thinking Inspired Approach to Understanding Design Activity

A Systems Thinking Inspired Approach to Understanding Design Activity

Towards AI-Assisted Protocol Analysis in Design Research: Automating Question Labelling with GPT-4 According to Eris’ (2004) Taxonomy

Analyzing problem framing in design teams: a systems mapping approach

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