The Situatedness of Design Concepts: Empirical Evidence From Design Teams in Engineering

Abstract

Situatedness in design suggest that designing is situated within the design process or the cognitive actions taken by the designer, the designer's expertise and know-how, the designer's experience generally and the interactions in the specific design task being undertaken as well as the interactions with the design artefact generated. In this paper, we analyzed the situatedness of design concepts generated by teams of professional engineers during a design task. The method combines protocol analysis, Natural Language Processing and network theory to provide a representation and a measurement of design situatedness overtime. Providing empirical evidence of the situatedness of concepts has been overlooked in design research. The method and results presented in this paper outlines the foundation to empirically explore design situatedness.