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Virtual Workshop
The contents below provide direct links to both the sessions and authors of the workshop. For each paper you can read the abstract and view a film of the presentation. A book containing all papers will appear in the second half of 2008.
1. Understanding Process [Matthews | Mabogunje | Reyman]
2. Values in Designing [Lloyd | Le Dantec | Dong]
3. Aspects of Design Content [Ball | Badke-Schaub | Akin]
4. Design Process Models [Gericke | Savanovic | Kan]
5. Language, Discourse and Gesture [Luck | McDonnell | Visser | Cardella]
6. Constructing Roles [Oak | Goldschmidt | Adams]
7. Designing Context [Atman | Glock]
8. Objects, References and Representations [Arikoglu | Stacey]
1. Understanding Process
Intersections of Social Order and Brainstorming Rules: Some Aspects of the Organisation of Collaborative Idea Generation
Ben Matthews
Mads Clausen Institute, Denmark
This presentation explores how designers manage their accountability to both the rules of brainstorming and normative social order. It finds that designers’ adherence to the rules of brainstorming are noticeably tempered by their orientation to social order, a finding that suggests a reassessment of the nature and use of methods in design.
Spider Webbing: A Paradigm for Engineering Design Conversations During Early Brainstorming
Ade Mabogunje, Neeraj Sonalkar, Malte Jung, Larry Leifer, Ozgur Eris
Stanford University, USA
In order to improve design performance one must be able to make accurate measurements of critical variables. The development of these variables begins with a search for underlying patterns that adequately describe the observed behaviours. Preliminary analysis of one of the datasets revealed a pattern of behaviour we have termed spider webbing. Further analysis has led to a set of three propositions for developing measures of design process performance.
A Closer Look at Co-Evolution in Design Practice
Isabelle Reyman, Kees Dorst, Frido Smulders
TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Co-evolution is considered a key characteristic of designing. Its theoretical grounding is, however, still in an early stage. In this presentation we aim to bring further the concept by studying a real life design meeting of an architect and a client. We developed a model of how co-evolution in a multi-party setting might work. We discerned 13 co-evolution episodes in the two meetings studied though modelling co-evolution in terms of problem and solution has limited value. Conversation in an area in between problem and solution, like 'use', seems to be more accurate in describing how the actors reach agreement. We propose alternative ways for modelling co-evolution.
2. Values in Designing
Ethical Imagination and Design
Peter Lloyd
The Open University, UK
Using the DTRS7 data of both Architectural and Engineering design meetings this presentation shows how the fields of ethics and design inter-relate, especially in the area of creative imagination. The paper first draws on Medway’s (2003) concept of ‘the virtual building’ to show how, in the data, essential aspects of designerly thinking can apply to ethics. It then goes on to show how, in the process of designing, designers engage implicitly with ethical issues. The paper discusses four extended examples from the data before suggesting that by addressing ethical subjects without framing them in explicitly ethical ways, the design process allows us to ‘imaginatively trace out the implications of our metaphors, prototypes and narratives’ a key element of ethical decision-making according to Johnson (1993).
The Mechanisms of Value Transfer in Design Meetings
Christopher Le Dantec, Ellen Yi-Luen Do
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA
We are interested in how values are transferred in the collaborative design process. By values, we mean the principles, standards, and qualities that guide actions. As designer and client co-design the artifact, they share and transfer ideas and concepts among themselves. We examine the interactions between architect and clients to investigate how each party reveals and responds to the different values brought to the design discourse. We analyze the verbal content and non-verbal communication cues from two design meetings and identify a pattern of discourse when both architect and client discuss values.
Affect-in-Cognition through the Language of Appraisals
Andy Dong*, Maaike Kleinsmann, Rianne Valkenburg
*University of Sydney, Australia
The premise of this presentation is that design thinking depends as much on affect-in-cognition as it does on logical thinking. Affect is a strong factor in regulating thinking because affect helps us to conditionally and unconditionally value situations with respect to value codes. Such cognitive behaviour is likely to cross over into design thinking, since the way designers value the design situation will influence the designer’s cognitive processing. We seek here to address the role of affect in designing by understanding the extent to which linguistic displays of affective processing serve designing ends. By coding design transcripts according to a formal, linguistic analysis of appraisals, the research indicates that appraisals provide an affective frame for design propositions. Such frames can be considered as the part of the design content, which provides designers with critical information upon which to base subsequent actions and tasks.
3. Aspects of Design Content
Analogical Reasoning and Mental Simulation in Design: Two Strategies Linked to Uncertainty Resolution
Linden Ball, Bo Christensen
University of Lancaster, UK & University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Our analysis of the engineering protocols aimed to further an understanding of the nature and function of analogising and mental simulation in design. Analogies were coded for ‘purpose’ and in terms of whether they were within-domain or between-domain. Simulations were coded for ‘focus’: technical/functional or end-user. All expressions of uncertainty were also identified. Analogies were found to be typically between-domain (indicative of innovative reasoning) and were evenly distributed across solution generation, function finding and explanation. Simulations were predominantly technical/functional. Our most striking observation was that analogies and simulations were associated with conditions of uncertainty. We propose that analogising and simulation are strategies deployed to resolve uncertainty – a claim that is supported by the fact that uncertainty levels returned to baseline values at the end of analogising and simulation episodes.
Task - Team - Process: Assessment and Analysis of the Development of Shared Representations in an Engineering Team
Petra Badke-Schaub, Kristina Lauche, Andre Neumann, Saeema Ahmed
TU Delft, The Netherlands
In this presentation, an analysis of the development of team mental models in two engineering meetings is described. The authors present a two-stage model of the development of sharedness in teams, which formed the basis for a communication analysis of both meetings. The transcripts of the meetings were categorised referring to underlying cognitive acts and design strategies. The results are largely consistent with the assumptions of the model indicating a lack of sharedness. This was confirmed by changes of frequencies linked to task-, team-, and process-related cognitive acts within and between the two meetings. Implications of the findings and the model are discussed.
Invariants of Design Cognition
Omer Akin
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, US
This presentation is a reexamination of the thesis that, in different fields of design, cognitive processes have significant similarities and differences that help us discriminate as well as bridge them. Some of the notable variants of design, that have been reported in the past, such as rich representations, inventive strategies, problem (de)composition, and complexity management (Akin 2000), have helped draw interdisciplinary comparisons. This paper is an attempt to validate these results against the DTRS7 protocol data and draw new conclusions about the invariants of design cognition.
4. Design Process Models
Dealing with Requirements: Influences on Idea Generation in the Early Stages of Product Development
Kilian Gericke, Michael Schmidt-Kretschmer, Lucienne Blessing
TU Berlin, Germany
This presentation aims at identifying factors which influence the number of ideas generated during a brainstorming meeting as part of an industrial mechanical engineering design project. A framework for describing groups of influencing factors and their relationships is used. As a result of an explorative, comparative protocol analysis of two design meetings the influence of some factors is described e.g. the formulation of the design task description and the sequence of the process steps.
Integral Design Concepts as a Result of Design Thinking
Perica Savanovic, Wim Zeiler, Emile Quenjel
TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands
We consider design thinking a realisation of potential for the creation of new design knowledge, through transformation of explicit design knowledge into integral design concepts. By analysing the development of the object of design during the provided A1 and E1 meetings, we have tried to show that, in order to produce integral concepts, a structured approach to team design is needed. This has been done using morphological overviews as a research tool, which visualized how integration of the design knowledge was introduced during both meetings. Our conclusions are that research on design thinking should aim to understand the nature of development of design knowledge and that, design-wise, a design methodology for the creation of integral concepts should be based on the results of this type of research.
Using the FBS Ontology to Capture Semantic Design Information in Design Protocol Studies
Jeff Kan*, John Gero
*University of Sydney, Australia
This paper presents a method to capture semantic information from design protocols independently of the number of participants. The paper reports on a preliminary study that analyses a design protocol by using the FBS ontology and derives processes within this ontological framework by employing linkography. The usefulness of this method is examined by applying it to the DTRS7 Engineering 1 protocol (E1) as a case study and the focus is team creativity. The original 1990 FBS ontology captures 58% meaningful processes of all the coded processes, while the situated FBS ontology captures 84% meaningful processes of all the coded processes. Further coding analysis may improve this percentage. The session is characterized, according to the ontology, by the high percentage of behaviour reformulation, followed by structure reformulation, and analysis. This ontologically-based coding provides opportunities to understand and compare design protocols in a uniform manner independent of discipline or number of designers.
5. Language, Discourse and Gesture
'Does this Compromise Your Design?' Socially Producing a Design Concept in Talk-in-Interaction
Rachael Luck
University of Reading, UK
In this presentation the interplay between a design concept and ideas are studied as they are mobilised in the interactions between an architect and client representatives, from two sequential architectural meetings. A ‘design concept’ was socially produced in these interactions, which was observed to moderate permitted moves in the design problem-solution space. Only the architect could warrant the properties of the concept that were used to support or reject (amongst other actions) ‘legitimate’ design moves with respect to the concept. These actions are significant in collaborative design situations as they highlight the local agency of an architect to moderate design ideas, actions which are indicative of an asymmetrical relationship between the architect and the client representatives. The agency of the design concept is also considered and a qualified association is made between the ‘object’ status of a design concept and objects in science, technology and society (STS) more generally.
Feedback to the Design: A Study of the Negotiation of Contributions in Design Conversations between Architect and Building Users
Janet McDonnell
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, UK
This presentation describes some of the features revealed from analysis of the conversational exchanges taking place during two meetings between architects and their building-user clients. It focuses on the verbal negotiations between those present, regarding both what the next actions are in the design process and what to attend to next within each meeting. It highlights blurring of boundaries between architects’ and building users’ (argumentation) positions and the potential of these as conversational moves. We see, as we might expect, conversational turns in which architects and building users contribute from their own territories of expertise and knowledge and we see them invite and respond to each others’ conversational openings for input. However, we also see tentative excursions where one party invokes the position or knowledge of the other in making a case for some design decision, provoking, in turn an expert response.
The Function of Gesture in an Architectural Design Meeting
Willemien Visser
The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, France
This presentation presents a cognitive-psychological analysis of spontaneous, co-speech gestures in a face-to-face, synchronous architectural design meeting. This investigation is the first stage of a larger cognitive-ergonomic analysis. Our long-term objective is to formulate specifications for remote, possibly asynchronous, collaborative-design systems, especially for supporting the use of different semiotic modalities (multi-modal interaction). According to their function, we distinguish two gesture categories: representational (entity designating and specifying) and organisational. Two functions perpendicular to these are the modulation of discourse and interaction, and the resolution of ambiguities.
Ambiguity as a Bridge between Mathematical Thinking and Design Thinking
Monica Cardella, Micah Lande
Stanford University, US
In this presentation we explore how practicing engineers confront ambiguity in the course of their design projects. This ambiguity may arise simply from the open-ended nature of the design prompt but also from changes in information given or discovered while in the design process, or from input from colleagues with varying specialized knowledge. Practicing engineers have options to either limit that ambiguity by undertaking convergent activities (like making design decisions, gathering more information from the user, from the market or elsewhere, making estimates or approximations or models), or diverge further and embrace that ambiguity (by invoking methods like brainstorming or postponing decision-making). In this project, we explore the sources of ambiguity and engineers’ reactions to ambiguity in their work, especially in relation to design thinking and mathematical thinking.
6. Constructing Roles
Performing Architecture: Talking 'Architect' and 'Client' into Being
Arlene Oak
University of Alberta, Canada
This presentation explores how the roles or social categories ‘architect’ and ‘client’ are performed by participants as they meet to talk about the design of a crematorium. The analytic framework through which the interaction is studied is Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA), which is associated with ethnomethodology and discursive social psychology. By attending to the participants’ talk through the perspectives of MCA, we can see how questions and answers, attributions of building ownership, and assessments of the building are enacted in ways that enable the participants to competently perform as ‘architect’ and ‘client’. Thus, as well as the participants’ interaction helping to shape the actual form of the building, it also helps to shape and perpetuate ideas concerning what it is to ‘do’ architecture.
Behind the Scenes of the Design Theatre: Actors, Roles and the Dynamics of Communication
Gabriela Goldschmidt, Doron Eshel
Technion: The Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
This presentation analyzes the architectural design meetings from the point of view of the actors who participate in the design theatre: their formal and informal roles in the design team, the specific contribution of designers and clients, and the nature of the communication between them. We look at the data in terms of adherence to purely professional decision making along with other dimensions of discourse that cushion the design process and provide the necessary social scaffolding that ensures successful team collaboration.
Exploring the Boundaries: Language, Roles, and Structures in Cross-Disciplinary Design Teams
Robin Adams, Llewellyn Mann, Shawn Jordan, Shanna Daly
Purdue University, Indiana, US
Four people are in a large conference room, each with their own perspective. One is exploring how people create common ground around interdisciplinary problems, another is writing her thesis proposal around disciplinary variations on 'design', and another completed his thesis on ways of experiencing sustainable design and has been having conversations with the fourth about interdisciplinary ways of thinking and being for two years. On the table is an envelope. Inside the envelope are three DVD cases and a letter welcoming the group to the 7th Design Thinking Research Symposium. This paper is their story: what they did, what they saw, and what it means.
7. Designing Context
Matters of Context in Design
Cynthia Atman, Jim Borgford-Parnell, Katherine Deibel, Allison Kang, Wai Ho Ng, Deborah Kilgore, Monica Cardella, Jennifer Turns
Washington University, Seattle, US
An engineer’s ability to address broader contexts in design is viewed by engineering experts as a critical competency for the 21st century. This study examined the DTRS7 data to understand how a design team handled context issues in their design process. We developed timelines to graphically illustrate when particular phenomena occurred in the design process. Intriguing relationships were found between contextual issues and several of those phenomena, which both support contemporary understandings of the design process and point to new arenas of inquiry.
Aspects of Language Use in Design Conversation
Fridrich Glock
TU Vienna, Austria
This presentation investigates episodes and some aspects of design conversation (A1). The analysis adopts an interpretative approach to design research and is guided by a qualitative research strategy. Designing is conceived as a social, interactive, interpretative process. Sociological and sociolinguistic concepts and research results are deployed to analyse design conversation and designing in terms of contexts and frames. The aim of the analysis is to reconstruct how participants interactively construct meaning in the design process and to describe practices they employ in the process.
8. Objects, References and Representations
Keeping Traces of Design Meetings through Intermediary Objects
Emine Serap Arikoglu, Eric Blanco, Franck Pourroy
INP Genoble, France
This paper presents an approach for analysing the use of intermediary objects involved in a design meeting. The aim of the research is to provide engineers with some indicators to help them identify the critical objects around which relevant design minutes should be constructed. Examples of such indicators are proposed from the analysis of an actual engineering meeting.
From Ronchamp by Sledge: On the Pragmatics of Object References
Martin Stacey*, Claudia Eckert*, Chris Earl
*Cambridge University, UK
References to previous designs and other objects play an important role in the synthesis of new design ideas, but object references are used for a wide variety of other purposes in design thinking. This study reports on the roles that object references played in design meetings in projects developing two very different products: a crematorium, and a hand-held device with a thermal print head for drawing on heat-sensitive paper. These roles depend on the moment-to-moment needs of the designers, which vary rapidly within meetings, and which are determined largely by the type of product and the state of the project. The references themselves were almost all either the most concise possible identifiers of concepts or features, or exemplars of categories.
Page Last Updated: 11 January, 2008
