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…

Background: Problem exploration includes identifying, framing, and defining design problems and bounding problem spaces. Intentional and unintentional changes in problem understanding naturally occur as designers explore design problems to create solutions. Through problem exploration, new perspectives on the problem can emerge along with new and…

Reported in this article are initial results from of a longitudinal study to characterize the design cognition and cognitive design styles of high school students with and without pre-engineering course experience over a 2-year period, and to compare them with undergraduate engineering students. The research followed a verbal protocol analysis…

The purpose of this study is to identify the occurrence of Sudden Moments of Inspiration (SMI) in the sketching process of industrial design through experiments to explain the effect of sub consciousness on SMI. There are a pre-experiment and a formal experiment. In the formal experiment, nine undergraduates majoring in industrial design with same…

The role of planning in the design of digital circuits was studied in two experiments. One compared the planning-related activities of expert designers and beginning students of design, and the other looked at the effect on circuit-design processes of forcing students to construct a global plan. In experiment 1, five undergraduate students…