Design teams often rely on precedents, but the impact of using the direct experience of a precedent on design behavior requires further investigation. To explore this impact, fifteen teams of master students of architecture participated in two design sessions: one without and the other with a previous experience of visiting an example. The…

Nature-inspired designs/organic designs exhibit a very close resemblance with nature especially in terms of form and structure. Form giving for organic design is a special class of design problem that involves the use of inspiration and analogies from nature for creative problem-solving. There is insufficient research in understanding this…

Design processes can be decomposed into several steps, including information acquisition and application. Retrieving prior knowledge and experience is an important method of acquiring design information, thus designers' precedents retrieval styles reflect their design thinking. The obvious difference between industrial (ID) and mechanical design…

This paper presents the results of a 2-year longitudinal study aimed at characterizing and comparing the design cognition of high school students with and without formal engineering design experiences. The students--working as dyads--engaged in design-only sessions generating solutions in response to the same engineering design challenges. The…

With the growing complexity of design technology and the emergence of intelligent design assistance, architectural studio classes are facing a new pedagogical paradigm. The digital literacy of younger generations and availability of scientific simulation have the potential to transform the traditional master-apprentice model. In our experiment, we…

One of the characteristics of the twenty-first century is the increase in the information sources available to designers to make their design decisions. However, current verbal protocol analysis methods and theoretical frameworks do not explain how internal and external information sources contribute to novice designers' moment-to-moment thought…

Design thinking holds the key to innovation processes, but is often difficult to detect because of its implicit nature. We undertook a study of novice designers engaged in team-based design exercises in order to explore the correlation between design thinking and designers' physical (observable) behavior and to identify new, objective, design…

Design within primary and secondary schools has been increasingly emphasized over the past decade. As a response to this increased interest, qualitative research examining students' cognitive processes involved in the practices of design has been on the rise. These studies have commonly employed the concurrent think-aloud research methodology to…

Design is a key element of both the teaching and learning of engineering and technology. However, the process of engineering design has yielded limited research results. This study explored the iterative design process by searching for sequential design thinking patterns. The researchers collected nine concurrent think-aloud protocols from…

Due to the wide application of digital tools and the improvement in interactive technologies, design thinking might change in digital world comparing to that in traditional design process. This study aims to explore the difference of design thinking between three kinds of sketching tools, i.e. hand-sketch, tablet, and pen-input display, by means…

Cultivating students' design abilities can be highly beneficial for the learning of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) concepts, and development of higher-order thinking capabilities (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council in STEM integration in k-12 education: status, prospects, and an agenda for…