<p><i>Design thinking is essential and the core of the design process as it helps to achieve the design goal by governing design decisions. Therefore, understanding design thinking is vital for improving design methods, tools and theories. However, interpreting design thinking is challenging because it is a cognitive process that is hidden and intangible. In this paper, we represent design thinking as an intermediate layer between the thought process and design behaviors. To do so, this paper first identifies five design behaviors based on the current design theories. These behaviors include action behavior, one-step sequential behavior, contextual behavior, long-term sequential behavior, and reflective thinking behavior. Next, we develop computational methods to characterize each of the design behaviors. Particularly, we use design action preference distribution, first-order Markov chain model, Doc2Vec, bi-directional LSTM autoencoder, and time gap distribution to characterize the design behaviors. The characterization of the design behaviors through embedding techniques is essentially the latent representation of the design thinking, which is referred to as design embeddings. After obtaining the embedding, an X-mean clustering algorithm is applied on each of the embeddings to group the designers.&nbsp; The approach is applied to data collected from a high school solar system design challenge.&nbsp; The clustering results show that designers follow several design patterns according to the corresponding behavior, which corroborates design embedding effectiveness. Successful implementation of this method to identify design embedding can be useful in other design research, such as infering design decisions, predicting design performance, and identifying design actions identification.</i></p>

Design Embedding: Representation Learning of Design Thinking to Cluster Design Behaviors

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2021/volume/85369

ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2021)

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