Design can be seen as a series of design decisions that are informed by information that the designer has gathered from the environment and transformed into actionable knowledge. The sheer volume and variety of available information compels designers to impose and refine structure upon the desired information, which, in turn, may affect subsequent design activities. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between designers’ information organization behaviors and their generated ideas to better understand how design decisions carry over across design activities. To address this, eight professionals (four from software design and four from graphic design) were recruited for individual 3-hour design sessions. They were asked to generate ideas for a design problem (reducing pedestrian accidents in Omaha) using the provided design information, which was specifically created and pilot tested for this study. Results reveal that designers structured the information in three different ways (Clusters, Relations, and Nests), and both designer background and organizational strategy display different patterns in the features generated in their ideas.


From Information to Ideas: How Designers Structure Information to Support Idea Generation

Division / Sponsors: 
Design Engineering Division and Computers & Information In Engineering Division


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2020/volume/83907

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