‘Design cognition’ refers to the mental processes and representations involved in designing, and has been a significant area of interest since the emergence of design research in the 1960s. The field now faces significant challenges moving into the future, with major change required to overcome stagnation in research topics and methodologies. Tackling these challenges requires us to understand the past and present of design cognition research, and open fresh discussions on its future. This thematic collection aims to address this need by taking stock of current approaches, exploring emerging topics and methodologies, and identifying future directions for enquiry. In this editorial, we examine key issues regarding both what we investigate and how we conduct this research. We present a vision formed from a structured literature review, the work of authors in the collection, and the views of a broad cross-section of the design cognition community. This vision is formalized in a roadmap from the present to the near and far future, highlighting key topics and research questions for the field. Ultimately, ecological measurement, new applications of artificial intelligence, and a move towards theory construction and research maturation constitute key long term challenges for the design cognition community.

Empathic design highlights the relevance of understanding users and their circumstances in order to obtain good design outcomes. However, theory-based quantitative methods, which can be used to test user understanding, are hard to find in the design science literature. Here, we introduce a validated method used in social psychological research – the empathic accuracy method – into design to explore how well two designers perform in a design task and whether the designers’ empathic accuracy performance and the physiological synchrony between the two designers and a group of users can predict the designers’ success in two design tasks. The designers could correctly identify approximately 50% of the users’ reported mental content. We did not find a significant correlation between the designers’ empathic accuracy and their (1) performance in design tasks and (2) physiological synchrony with users. Nevertheless, the empathic accuracy method is promising in its attempts to quantify the effect of empathy in design.

This paper presents a framework for studying design thinking. Three paradigmatic approaches are described to measure design cognitive processes: design cognition, design physiology and design neurocognition. Specific tools and methods serve each paradigmatic approach. Design cognition is explored through protocol analysis, black-box experiments, surveys and interviews. Design physiology is measured with eye tracking, electrodermal activity, heart rate and emotion tracking. Design neurocognition is measured using electroencephalography, functional near infrared spectroscopy and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Illustrative examples are presented to describe the types of results each method provides about the characteristics of design thinking, such as design patterns, design reasoning, design creativity, design collaboration, the co-evolution of the problem solution space, or design analysis and evaluation. The triangulation of results from the three paradigmatic approaches to studying design thinking provides a synergistic foundation for the understanding of design cognitive processes. Results from such studies generate a source of feedback to designers, design educators and researchers in design science. New models, new tools and new research questions emerge from the integrated approach proposed and lay down future challenges in studying design thinking.

Talking about design, most discussions circulate around physical objects or products, around their invention, development, production and marketing. While most modern design approaches do also cover questions pertaining to human interaction, e.g. within user- or human-centred design philosophies, a systematic and fundamental conception of the role and implications that human perception and emo-cognitive processing take with regard to designing physical goods is lacking. Under the umbrella term ‘Psychology of Design’, I will develop and elaborate on psychological dimensions that are highly relevant to the optimization and evaluation of design. I propagate a general psychological turn in design theory and practice in order to purposefully include not only the top-down processes triggered by context, framing, expectation, knowledge or habituation but also the psychological effects of Gestalt and Zeitgeist. Such psychological effects have the potential to determine whether the very same physical design will be aesthetically appreciated, desired, loved or rejected in the end. Psychology of design has a tremendous influence on the success and sustainability of design by triggering associations and displaying demand characteristics in a multimodal way. The paper is based on fundamental psychological theories and empirical evidences which are linked to applied examples from the world of art and design.

This paper presents an exercise on theory building to characterise design ideation. It starts by examining how early ideas are defined and evaluated in the literature. An essentialist view is identified that explains the creativity of a final design solution by the creative qualities of early ideas attributed by external judges. Criteria for a theory of ideation that does not rely on the primacy of essence are enumerated. Advanced professional practice is examined to understand evaluation of early ideas ‘in the wild’. Accretion is then introduced as an analogical model to imaginatively drive definitions and conjectures about idea formation in the co-evolution of problem and design spaces. Vignettes from ideation episodes are used to illustrate an accretion theory of ideation. An accretion theory supports new ways to think about ideation as a complex formation process where creative solutions emerge from the synthesis of a multitude of fragmentary and partial ideas – or ‘ideasimals’. An accretion theory of ideation helps to explain the creative value of a final design solution without relying on early ideas having a creative essence, because the creativity of a solution is viewed as emergent rather than present in early versions. An accretion lens is used to suggest new ideation metrics to study the qualities of idea fragments and the process of idea formation. Definitions and relevant assessment regimes for different stages of ideation are discussed. The paper concludes with a discussion on entailments of an accretion theory and next steps for this theory building enterprise.

The performance of a design team is influenced by each team member’s unique cognitive style – i.e., their preferred manner of managing structure as they solve problems, make decisions, and seek to bring about change. Cognitive style plays an important role in how teams of engineers design and collaborate, but the interactions of cognitive style with team organization and processes have not been well studied. The limitations of small-scale behavioral experiments have led researchers to develop computational models for simulating teamwork; however, none have modeled the effects of individuals’ cognitive styles. This paper presents the Kirton Adaption–Innovation Inventory agent-based organizational optimization model (KABOOM), the first agent-based model of teamwork to incorporate cognitive style. In KABOOM, heterogeneous agents imitate the diverse problem-solving styles described by the Kirton Adaption-Innovation construct, which places each individual somewhere along the spectrum of cognitive style preference. Using the model, we investigate the interacting effects of a team’s communication patterns, specialization, and cognitive style composition on design performance. By simulating cognitive style in the context of team problem solving, KABOOM lays the groundwork for the development of team simulations that reflect humans’ diverse problem-solving styles.

The construction of future technological systems in work domains that do not yet exist, known as the envisioned world problem, is an increasingly important topic for designers, particularly given the rapid rate of technological advancement in the modern era. This paper first discusses the theoretical underpinnings of using cognitive work analysis (CWA) for developing a decision support system (DSS) situated within the envisioned world problem and recasts the problem as pathway-dependent processes. Using this pathway-dependent framework, each stage of the envisioning process is described to reveal how human factors experts can link existing work domains to envisioned instances. Finally, a case study example of the envisioning process that incorporates CWA modelling is demonstrated as it pertains to the advancement of the human spaceflight domain. As a result, this paper provides a unified treatment of the envisioned world problem with an end-to-end example of one approach to designing future technologies for future work domains.