This paper presents a systematic method and coding scheme to convert concept maps into bi-partite graphs that can be computationally evaluated for topological complexity measurements. The coding scheme is focused on splitting concepts with multiple elements embedded and linking these objectively. The guidance for this is established and the method presented with examples. The motivation for this work is to establish a means to objectively compare concept maps generated by individuals at the beginning and the end of an intervention to measure the impact of the intervention. The reliability of the coding scheme is presented in separate work.

Engineering design has recently undergone a paradigm shift led by generative artificial intelligence (AI). The Generative Design (GD) paradigm utilizes generative AI tools (e.g., large language models) to define the objective space and computationally exploit the design space. This is a drastic shift from the roles of human designers in the Traditional Design (TD) paradigm which consists of manual design-objective space co-evolution, and has created a research gap for Generative Design Thinking (GDT): how a designer thinks and cognitively approaches the design process during GD. To fill this gap, we propose the Paradigmatic Design Thinking Model which uniquely defines design thinking as situated within three factors (Design Cognition, Design Tools, and Design Methodology) and use it to explain design thinking in two paradigms: Traditional Design Thinking and Generative Design Thinking.

This study explores user engagement and strategic interaction with a newly designed tangible game board- a 3x3x3 cube frame with 27 voids and 27 game pieces. 15 teams, each with 2 players, were provided with only the game set to develop their own game rules and strategies, encouraging participants to engage in the spatial and experiential aspects that the game board offers. Researchers observed how players approached the 3D structure and developed gameplay tactics without predefined rules, fostering creativity and exploration. Importantly, the study captured feedback on the structure’s versatility, with many participants developing new game rules, which implies its potential as a game platform. The experiments revealed that one of the emergences resulting from the affordances of the game platform is a game strategy for 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, amongst the many other possible games identified.

Understanding how Shared Mental Models (SMMs) develop within design teams has sparked interest in the design community of decades. But to date, there is still a lack of understanding of the factors that influence the development of these structures. This review examines the literature related to SMMs and the factors that impact collaborative efforts. Aiming to bring these two research fields together, this review proposes a new framework to help researchers better understand how SMMs develop and provide a foundation for new research and empirical evidence to establish the factors that influence the development of SMMs

This paper introduces a novel approach to analysing design protocols using a combination of methods. It describes an approach using a synthesis of concept extraction (using an LLM), semantic analysis (using word vectors and conceptual clustering), and network analysis (following graph construction). It suggests that the resulting measures are useful for studying design framing and for aiding qualitative analysis. It demonstrates this technique with data from a study of 17 designers addressing two design problems. The method enables the comparison of designers working on the same problem as well as the study of individual designers’ use of concepts over time during a think-aloud study.

Assumption-making is a critical cognitive process in design, where incomplete information is ever-present. Understanding how assumptions are formed, maintained, and adapted can offer key insights into decision-making. While theoretical explorations of assumptions exist, empirical research remains limited. This pilot study investigates how varying temporal constraints influence assumption-making while solving ill-structured problems. The challenge lies in isolating the temporal and cognitive factors at play. The early insights reveal that task ambiguity, contextual framing, and time constraints play significant roles in shaping responses, highlighting the dual nature of assumption-making as both adaptable and resistant to change. The insights highlight the importance of strategic task design that balances ambiguity and structure to deepen our understanding of assumption-making.

This study investigates user engagement and its relationship with the visual aspects of design using a newly designed 3D Tic-Tac-Toe. The research examines user experience factors like cognitive engagement, fun, stress relief, etc., and to analyze their correlation with the design principles found in literature, such as Contrast, Framing, and Balance. 15 teams, comprising 2 players each, from design academic backgrounds, were provided with the game board to play. Researchers observed interactions and challenges, while subsequent surveys captured experience, aesthetics, emotional response, and design principles. The findings reveal the strong and weak correlations amongst the factors and the principles, highlights further prototype refinement. The insights integrate cognitive and emotional dimensions with core principles of design to create engaging and visually satisfying products.

The study investigates the cognitive aspects of aesthetic taste, which is a subjective quality linked to individuals’ ability to make superior aesthetic judgments. It explores how evaluation modes during product choice decision-making relate to aesthetic taste. We defined taste through two dimensions: expertise (professional experience) and acumen (consumption experiences). By comparing research participants in a consumer study across these dimensions, we analyzed decision-making patterns using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Our results show that participants with low aesthetic taste (across both dimensions) express their product choice in terms of product attributes they dislike. We also find that the expression of personal preferences is associated with low aesthetic taste for the expertise dimension but is associated with high aesthetic taste for the acumen dimension.

Problem framing is a foundational aspect of the engineering design process, shaping how designers perceive challenges and potential solutions. Qualitiative methods, such as protocol analysis, have provided valuable insights about problem framing but are labor-intensive and time consuming. This study explores the use of a NLP technique BERTopic, to analyze framing in design conversations. BERTopic retains contextual nuances, offering a tool for uncovering the diversity and uniqueness of concepts explored by design teams while also making the analysis process more efficient. The results provide one representation of eight design group’s processes, highlighting the different and changing topic representations that emerge throughout a design session. The findings highlight the potential of NLP tools for enhancing our understanding of framing in design cognition and team dynamics.

This study examines the effects of linguistic elements in Vocaloid BGM on creativity, fluency and originality, aiming to design sound environments that enhance creative performance. Experiments were conducted under three BGM conditions: voiced-meaningful (VF), voiced-meaningless (VL), and non-voiced (NV). VF utilized the original Vocaloid song with lyrics, NV excluded lyrics entirely, while VL replaced lyrics with the syllable “la.” Results revealed that VF BGM could disrupt concentration and reduce creativity, while VL and NV conditions enhanced relaxation and improved originality. These effects became more pronounced as tasks progressed. A positive correlation was identified between mind-wandering tendencies and creativity, particularly with VF BGM. The findings highlight the importance of tailoring sound environments to cognitive modes and personal characteristics.

Engineering systems are represented in a variety of physical, graphical, and virtual ways, supporting decision making about the systems and their operation. As part of a larger research endeavor exploring influences of representation modality, the presented work examines how product identification impacts subsystem clustering behavior. This is achieved through a study using pictorial and functional representations of common household products. Participants were tasked with grouping elements into non-overlapping clusters. Results suggest that correctly identifying a product does not affect clustering behavior regardless of representation modality. This implies that other aspects of the representations are impacting partition convergence. These factors, along with connections to prior work are explored as discussion points and areas of future research.

Resonance, where individual creative moments resonate with each other, has been qualitatively recognized as an important phenomenon during co-creation. In a previous study, the authors conducted a concept generation pair work experiment using biosignal indicators and quantitatively grasped the difference between creative states that are simply creative and those that are resonant. This study explores whether it is possible to estimate these creative states using biosignal indicators with the Hidden Markov Model. The parameters for the Hidden Markov Model were based on multimodal biosignal indicators and subjective self-reflection reports regarding the creative states during co-creation. The results suggested that creative states can be estimated during co-creation using a Hidden Markov Model, and resonance can be understood as a shared form of self-resonance driven by concept generation.

Concept maps have been used to measure student learning and performance comparisons before and after interventions. However, these concept maps may vary in structure and content. The complexity of the maps are difficult to measure when multiple concepts are embedded within individuals nodes. A systematic coding scheme is evaluated for objectivity and reliability using 22 undergraduate researchers. The findings suggest that the coding scheme is suitable and will allow multiple different researchers to generate similar bi-partite graphs from the notional concept maps generated. Additional work is needed to ensure that the semantic content is not invalidated through the coding scheme.

Engineering design tasks are cognitively complex and there is a growing interest in understanding the neurocognitive processes involved in design. Consequently, researchers are increasingly using bio-physical markers such as eye tracking to study design neurocognition. However, these studies are largely correlational, and little is understood about the construct validity of eye-tracking metrics such as fixation durations and saccade frequency. Moreover, these studies rarely account for non-design factors such as neurodivergence (e.g., ADHD) on eye-tracking metrics during design. We aim to examine this research gap through a causal-comparative study with designers with and without ADHD, performing divergent and convergent design tasks. Our findings call for a deeper investigation into the construct validity of eye-tracking metrics while considering a broad range of external factors.

Over the last decade, engineering institutions have implemented changes in engineering education curriculum to address evolving industry needs. This includes the integration of design-focused curricula at various instances throughout engineering programs. This study investigates the relationship between design problem modality and neural activity. Participants in this study were engineering students enrolled in cornerstone design. Neural activity was measured using electroencephalography (EEG) during a single session where students were presented with two design problem modalities. This data was compared with motivational factors and learning preferences. The findings reveal correlations between neural activation, student motivation, and learning preferences. This suggests that problem modality influences cognition and motivation, offering valuable insight into individual student needs.

As conceptual design sketches are a common tool used to communicate between team members, it is important to understand the relationship between sketch characteristics and engineers’ perceptions. This study evaluates 4 line styles common in many sketch techniques: the Single Line, Feathered Line, Heavily Feathered Line, and Variable Line. 40 mechanical engineers ranked preferences of complex engineering products in these line styles and provided adjectives to describe their choices. Results show that engineers preferred the Single Line, which had the common adjectives of clear and professional. The findings suggest that engineers should generally be learning and using a single, uniform and clean line style.

In this study, professional engineers and designers (n = 30) participated in a 1-hour-long design activity in which they brainstormed a list of ideas for two design problems (a smart grill and a smart laundry machine), created a sketched concept for each design problem, filled out a survey about their perceptions of the market for the concept they developed, participated in a bias mitigation intervention and then repeated the pre-intervention steps. The design problems were intended to trigger availability bias based on the participants’ occupations (engineers and designers at a kitchen appliance company) as well as conflict between the gender of the participants and the gender-stereotyping of the household tasks fulfilled by the smart machines. Based on correlations in the market survey, the participants, who were mostly men, displayed availability bias toward the smart laundry machine design problem. A key marker of availability bias – an association between participants’ personal enjoyment of the product and the belief that the product would be commercially successful – was eliminated after the bias mitigation intervention. Qualitative analysis of participants’ reflections indicated that the intervention primarily assisted designers in making additional considerations for users, such as increasing accessibility and building awareness of excluded user groups.

The literature suggests that product and product-service system (PSS) design problems are characteristically different. However, there is limited empirical evidence to suggest that the design cognition specific to the respective design activities is different. This article reports the findings of a comparative study of protocols of conceptual product and PSS designing carried out in a laboratory environment by 28 pairs of experienced product designers from the manufacturing industry. First, differences between product and PSS design problems were theoretically characterized in terms of their respective sources of complexity. Based on these differences, hypotheses concerning differences in the cognitive processes of conceptual product and PSS designing were developed and empirically tested. Results indicate that PSS designing by experienced product designers is more problem-focused while product designing is more solution-focused. PSS designing was found to focus more on the design issue function and the design process formulation. Further, PSS designing was more likely to apply a depth-first search strategy, while product designing was more apt to apply a breadth-first search strategy. Results point towards the need to support the analysis of derived behavior of structure and the application of a breadth-first strategy during PSS designing by product designers.

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.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been extensively applied in design, particularly for analyzing technical documents like patents and scientific papers to identify entities such as functions, technical feature, and problems. However, there has been less focus on understanding semantic relations within literature, and a comprehensive definition of what constitutes a relation is still lacking. In this paper, we define relation in the context of design and the fundamental concepts linked to it. Subsequently, we introduce a framework for employing NLP to extract relations relevant to design.