Visual materials and designers' cognitive activity:
Towards in-depth investigations of design cognition
Céline Mougenot*,** Katsumi Watanabe* Carole Bouchard** Ameziane Aoussat**
* The University of Tokyo
RCAST, Watanabe Lab (Cognitive Science)
Tokyo, Japan, {celine} {kw} @fennel.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp
** Arts et Metiers ParisTech
Laboratoire Conception de Produits et Innovation (Design Science)
Paris, France, {carole.bouchard} {ameziane.aoussat} @paris.ensam.fr
Abstract:
Since two decades, there has been a growing interest in design cognition and design
creativity. Designing is often described as an informational process in which designers manipulate
information to produce design outputs. In this informational processing activity, many studies
pointed out the major role of visual materials. This paper reports a selection of lab-based
experiments which investigated the role of visual information in the design process and its impact
on design creativity. These investigations mainly focused the explicit process of design and today
the implicit process still remains vaguely depicted. Based on both former design studies and
findings on human brain processing, we propose further investigations on the perception of visual
information in design activity and explorations of the link between visual information and design
creativity. This paper shows a possible research direction where design science and cognitive
science meet up with a common goal of better understanding design creativity.
Key words: Design cognition, design creativity, explicit and implicit process of design activity,
analogical reasoning, visual perception, images, visual imagery
1. Introduction: Investigating design activity from various points of view
From the early works on design activity by [Simon, 1969], there has been a growing interest in studying design
activity and design protocol [Cross et al., 1996]. Why such a growing interest? From the point of view of design
educators and design practitioners, these studies help to enhance the design process and to improve the level of
creativity of design outputs. Actually, knowledge of designers' practices and needs is necessary to propose new
design tools or interfaces and to bring relevant information to designers. Studies on design activity are not only
necessary for design process enhancements, they are also a perfect mean for discovering human brain
capabilities. So far, very few cognitive studies focused specific professional activities; but design activity being
such a complex combination of several cognitive operations (creativity, problem-solving, attention, visual
perception, memory...), studying design cognition will increase the knowledge on human brain capabilities,
especially creative capabilities. Besides, on top of design specialists and cognitive scientists, other connected
fields can benefit from advances in design cognition, as artificial intelligence and computer science. Therefore,
research on design cognition is useful for many disciplines.
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As all human activities, design activity is made of two related components: implicit process and explicit process.
The explicit process consists of using and creating visible components, while the implicit process consists of
mental activities and mental computation of external information. So far, most design studies investigated the
explicit design process, since it is more easily observed and assessed. But the more we want to refine the design
activity understanding, the more we have to study implicit processes of design activity and the link between
implicit and explicit processes. We recently noticed a growing number of studies on design implicit process;
most of them consists in detecting differences in cognitive processes between novice and expert designers; in
fact, after investigating the Limited Commitment Mode control strategy [Kim et al., 2007] or the problem
decomposition strategy [Liikkanen & Perttula, 2008], the findings confirmed that the cognitive strategies of
novices and experts were different. It also gives more knowledge about the problem-solving cognitive operation.
In this paper, we first introduced a selection design studies aimed at describing the explicit process of design
activity (section 2). Then, we report an overview of studies which help understanding the design process; these
studies are mainly investigating creativity and analogical reasoning in design. In this context, our focus is the
role of visual information in design creativity, about which we report some initial experiments. To push these
investigations further, we propose to carry out in-depth investigations correlating design tangible traces and
designers' brain activity. In other words, our objective is to study the relationship between the explicit and
implicit processes of design activity.
2. Investigating the explicit process of design activity
In this paragraph, the most studied components of design activity are reported: sketching, browsing visual
materials, reasoning by analogies. At the end of this section, we propose a representation of design activity,
emphasizing the relationships between the explicit process and the implicit process of design.
2.1 Sketching activity: producing hand-made drawings
Sketching is an important part of design practice and design education and there has been a large amount of
research investigations on the sketching activity by designers. As [Schön, 1992] defined it, design can be seen as
a reflective conversation based on a generation-visualization loop, made possible by the production of handmade drawings. Based on observations of the usual practice of sketching, it was confirmed by later studies that
sketching would enable to designers to visualize and interpret their ideas and the visualization of their own
sketches would give a new twist to their idea flow [Van der Lugt, 2001] [Tovey, 2003]. Designers externalize
their mental images by sketching. Sketching is essential in design process not only because it supports the
generation of new ideas, but also because it prevents designers to experience an overload of visuo-spatial
working memory [Bilda & Gero, 2007]. In an experiment with six architects, the authors compared the design
process in blindfolded and in sketching conditions. An interesting finding is that overall cognitive activity and
perceptual activity in blindfolded conditions drop below the activity in sketching conditions after 20 minutes
during the timeline of design activity. An explanation proposed by the authors is that blindfolded condition
requires a higher cognitive activity and that when not sketching, designers will experience overload of visuospatial working memory. It was also observed that in blindfolded conditions, the idea generation index
significantly dropped in the second periods of blindfolded sessions but not in sketching session. This reinforces
the idea that sketching activity impacts idea generation and thus is crucial in the design process.
2.2 Browsing activity: looking at inspirational visual information
In the design process, visual information are a major support for analogy-making. Two famous examples are
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quoted in research literature: “Juicy Salif” lemon squeezer would have been inspired by sci-fi comics books read
by Philippe Starck as a young boy [Lloyd & Snelders, 2003] and The Dancing Building in Prag, designed by
Frank O. Gehry from a movie dancing scene with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers [Kacher, 2005].
Juicy Salif by Philippe Starck
« Tancicky Dum » in Prag, by Frank O. Gehry
Aside these famous examples of visual inspiration, it has been frequently observed by researchers that designers
intensively browse images from magazines or websites and used collection of precedents. To support this
common practice among designers, design-dedicated softwares or interfaces have been developed to retrieve
images, such as : EVIDII and IAM-eMMa [Nakakoji], ProductWorld [Pasman, 2003], Cabinet [Keller et al.,
2005, 2009], CRAI Interface [Kacher, 2006], i-vidi [Jung et al., 2007], TRENDS [Bouchard et al., 2008].
Table 1: Selection of image-retrieving interfaces for designers
ProductWorld
[Pasman, 2003]
Similarity-based Engine
[Restrepo, 2005]
Cabinet
[Keller et al., 2005, 2008]
TRENDS
[Bouchard et al., 2008]
It is widely recognized that designers collect images and use them to prepare graphic display, such as trendboards for instance. An on-going study [Kim et al., 2008] aim at describing the intermediate step between
images collection and sketching, also called “information categorization”. In this step, design information get
externalized by sketching activity, it relates to cognitive tasks of construction, categorization and application of
design information for idea generation.
2.3 Design thinking: analogical reasoning and visual imagery
Design process is largely based on cognitive operations of problem-solving, as association of ideas: combination,
mutation, analogy [Rosenman & Gero, 2002]. In a study with four architectural designers who had to describe
verbally their mental path, [Leclercq & Heylighen, 2002] observed that 5.8 analogies/hour were made.
Research in psychology is much interested in problem-solving issues and many studies have been trying to
model creativity processes. In fact, we learn from a psychological literature review by [Anolli et al., 2001] that
analogical-reasoning consists of two key steps: “retrieval” (alternatively called retrieval, search, selection or
access) during which designers evoke potentially-inspirational information, and “mapping” (alternatively called
use, applying or adapting) in which designers adapt selected information to the design target. Their study with a
panel of students (non-designers) showed that analogical reasoning is improved when the subjects are prompted
to use designated sources of information. Even though designers might have better creative abilities than the
normal population, we tend to think that helping designers to retrieve relevant sources of information will
support their analogical-reasoning and creative activity; this might be particularly helpful for novice designers.
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Transforming keywords into visual images is a common operation processed by designers, which was studied by
[Nagai & Noguchi, 2002]. The focus was about the way designers think with drawings in order to generate
visual images of an artefact. In doing so, designers have to link low-level information (drawings, artefact) with
high-level information (abstract keywords) and thus, the creative thinking process needs an overall high abstract
level when having to create a visual image from a verbal stimulus. The transformation of a verbal stimulus into
visual imagery can be seen as a specificity of design practice.
2.4 A representation of design cognitive activity
To summarize the above-referenced studies, we attempted to represent the design process as a flow of
information, involving cognitive operations, as shown in figure 1 below. Along a design activity timeline, this
process is made of steps from the reception of a design brief to the production of sketches. This process consists
of two major components:
1)
2)
emergence : retrieval and mapping steps, ending up with the generation of an idea
sketching : generation-visualization iterative process / ideas refinement through the production of drawings
Fig. 1: Implicit and explicit processes of design activity, with a focus on the use of visual information [Mougenot, 2008]
The time when each cognitive operation occurs still has to be clarified, but this model is mainly aimed at
gathering designers' cognitive operations in one single view, showing that implicit and explicit processes are
connected and that external visual information play an essential and continuous role in design creativity.
3. Investigating the role of visual information in the design process
3.1 Images and their impact onto design creativity
A study by [Malaga, 2000] with a non-designers panel showed that images are a better source of creativity than
words. The experiment objective was to compare the impact of picture and words onto creativity in a
brainstorming task. Picture and word stimuli were used to elicit ideas. The results indicate that the use of picture
stimuli outperforms words for generating creative ideas. Also an interesting finding is that pictures alone give
better results than pictures and words combined.
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Fig. 2: Visual information have the highest impact onto general creativity [Malaga, 2000]
In a design context, several other studies have demonstrated that images have a positive impact onto design
creativity. For instance, [Christiaans, 1992] and [Leclercq & Heylighen, 2002] showed that the use of visual
stimuli helped designers to produce more outputs; visual stimuli lead to the production of more ideas.
Also, [Goldschmidt & Smolkov, 2006] compared the level of creativity of designers' outputs, in two different
working environments : surrounded by pictures or not (fig.3). This study showed that visual stimuli not only help
designers to produce more ideas but also they help designer to produce outputs with a higher level of creativity.
Fig. 3: Experimental settings, without and with surrounding visual stimuli [Goldschmidt & Smolkov, 2006] 3.2 Noteworthy features of images used in design process
1) Distance between source and target Analogical reasoning is defined as the retrieval of information from memory, followed by the mapping of
selected retrieved information into a new context. In other words, inspirational sources can be gradually distant
from the target. For instance, in a study by [Malaga, 2000], students from various backgrounds had to solve
problems in various fields (medical sciences, politics...) with given clues from the same field ("close associates")
or from other fields ("remote associates"). [Casakin & Goldschmidt, 1999] investigated how architects,
students or experts, solved architectural cases, refering to architectural precedents ("within-domain") or to art,
nature... ("between-domain"). In product design, according to [Bonnardel & Marmeche, 2005], inspirational
sources can be assigned to three types of domain, based on the proportion of shared properties with the target:
"intra-domain", "close inter-domain" and "far inter-domain", as quoted below:
- A source is judged as intra-domain if, without any ambiguity, it pertains to the ‘‘seat’’ category, which is the category
the object to be designed (target object) belongs to (e.g., a dental office chair, a rocking chair, etc.).
- A source is judged close inter-domain if it keeps some properties of the seat category but not the most prototypical ones
(e.g., we can sit on a sledge or on a rocking horse, but there is no back as is the case for the most typical seat: a chair).
- A source is judged far inter-domain if it obviously does not belong to the category of the target object (e.g., a wave or a
nest).
In the following table, we reported the terms used in design or psychological literature to describe the semantic
fields involved in analogical-reasoning.
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Table 2 : Terms used to describe the distance between source and target, in analogical reasoning Intra-domain
Far inter-domain
[Bonnardel & Marmeche, 2005]
Within-domain
Between-domain
[Casakin & Goldschmidt, 1999]
Close associate
Remote associate
[Malaga, 2000]
Direct link
Close inter-domain
Indirect link
Surface similarity
Extra-contextual link
[Leclercq & Heylighen, 2002]
Structural similarity
[Tseng et al., 2008]
In the study by [Bonnardel & Marmeche, 2005], images were shown to designers who had to describe what
element in the image was useful in the context of a given design problem. One of the findings was that interdomain sources had a higher positive impact on the evocation of new ideas than intra-domain sources. Besides,
depending on the domain of origin, the sources led to the evocation of different components: e.g. intra-domain
sources mainly led to the evocation of functional aspects (rather than structural, affective or aesthetic aspects). In
another study carried out with a sample of car designers, [Mougenot, 2008] observed that sources from other
domains than car design, as architecture and fashion, had a positive impact onto the level of creativity of
designers' sketches assessed by external judges.
2) Timing and analogical reasoning
The generation of new design ideas is the process which can take from a few seconds to several days and thus it
seems obvious that there is an essential time factor to be taken in consideration when studying design activity.
[Tseng et al., 2008] designed an experiment to evaluate the effect of timing of information accessed by
designers when trying to solve a problem. Among several findings, it was shown that information that is more
obviously similar to the problem impacted idea generation process more than distant information when accessed
before the problem-solving task had started. This finding confirms that there visual perception and image use are
not only a matter of content (related or distant information) but also a matter of timing; as design cognitive
processes definitely are time-related, further studies should integrate the time factor.
3.3 Preliminary investigations on images perception in the design process
Limitations of previous studies: it is based on the hypothesis that what a subject (designer) sees in the image is
what the experimenter sees in the image. But, we think that the designers go through an perception/interpretation
step which might not be taken into account by the experimenters and thus lead to distorted analyses when the
experimenters correlate visual information seen by designers and design outputs. Therefore we proposed to
investigate how designers actually perceive visual information, with a focus on the “level of abstraction”. We set
up an experiment with four subjects, professional designers in Italian car-design companies. After receiving a
design brief, the designers had to browse a selection of magazines from various fields, to retrieve the images
they found interested in the context given by the brief and to annotate each selected images with explanations
about the reasons of the selection [Mougenot et al., 2008]. Based on the annotations, the images were then
broken down into three categories (high, medium and low level of abstraction) by the experimenter, as described
in table 3.
Table 3 : Levels of abstraction to describe the content of visual materials Abstraction level
Typical content
Examples
High
Atmospheres, sensations
Cool. Provocation.
Medium
Products or sectors names
Architecture. Cars.
Low
Materials, colors, textures
Colors. Shapes.
It was found out that most selected images were annotated with high level terms (29 images over 70) or low
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level terms (26 images over 70),
while “medium level” images did not draw much of subjects' attention. It can
be assumed that designer either pick images which create an atmosphere or provide sensations (high level) or
images which give detailed information about concrete design elements (low level). A question that raises from
our findings is related to the earlier-mentioned time factor: we would like to investigate whether the type of
images is dependent on the time in the design process and our hypothesis is that high-level images might be
more useful at the beginning of the ideation process and low-level images when the ideation is more advanced.
These preliminary findings showed that designers retrieve different kinds of images when browsing visual
information (images with low and high level of abstraction). Further investigation will focus the relationship
between the level of abstraction of inspirational images and the level of creativity of design outputs.
4. Towards qualitative investigations on implicit design process
Former design studies brought information about design activity and its cognitive correlate. When dealing with
similar cognitive operations (e.g. visual perception), findings in cognitive science can bring new insights into
design science. In this section, we report a selection of relevant investigations in cognitive science.
4.1 Trend in cognitive studies: investigating creativity in professional practices
As explained by [Fink et al., 2009], most of creative thinking tasks which are studied in cognitive and
neuroscientific research are basic types of tasks and most of the experimental studies are based on tasks
consisting of verbal stimuli. Thus, these experiments can only end up with findings on basic aspects of creative
thinking. From a neuroscience point of view, research in the field of creativity is challenged by the studies of
real-life complex creativity tasks. Besides, most of the studies in this field of research investigated brain activity
patterns in samples of university students or in samples of the normal population. There are very few studies in
neuroscience which involve specific samples who have a creative practice, such are designers or musicians.
Noteworthy exceptions are the studies who investigated brain activity in samples of scientists [Bhattacharya &
Petsche, 2002], artists [Chávez-Eakle et al., 2007] and dancers [Fink et al., 2009]. In the trend of studying
creative professional practices, we are convinced that cognitive and neuroscientific investigations on designers'
activity would bring useful advances to cognition knowledge and to creativity studies.
4.2 Visual perception: relevant neurosciences findings
Design activity involve cognitive operations as creativity, problem-solving, memory, attention, perception so it
is expected that the exploration of cognitive science and neuroscience studies through the prism of design studies
brings in-depth knowledge of design processes and activities.
Most investigations by cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are held outside the specific context of design
activity. Since it has been shown by design studies that the use of images has a major role within the design
process; it is therefore highly relevant to review investigations about the perception of visual information
[Watanabe & Shimojo, 2005] [Ariga et al., 2007]. Other recent studies explored brain activity in visual mental
imagery and visual perception, with traditional approaches in neurosciences: functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) as [Ganis et al., 2004] or event-related brain potential (ERP) as [Qiu et al., 2007]. Other
cognitive operations are involved in the design process, such as attention, visual attention, color perception...
More specifically, we propose to investigate the perception of images and the visual imagery process, with a
focus on the type of visual content: animate/inanimate things and level of abstraction. This core idea is based on
recent findings in neurosciences which depicts that the human brain discriminates images based on their content
and processes them in various areas. Thus, the organization of the human visual system is based on high-order
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objects recognition processes. Face recognition is widely known to be processed by a specific area of the brain
(in a part of temporal lobe called Fusiform Gyrus) but this type of processing not only concerns pictures of faces.
In fact, several Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies reported by [Mahon et al., 2007, 2009]
have shown that the brain discriminates living things vs. non-living things and manipulable objects (tools and
utensils) vs. large non-manipulable objects (scenes). In fact, images of manipulable objects are processed by
Fusiform Gyrus while images of non-manipulable objects are processed by Parahippocampal Gyrus. This
differentiation in brain processing is particularly relevant in the context of design where designers handle and
use all kinds of images, not only images of precedents, as studied by most design investigations so far, but also
images of highly-contextualized objects as scenes or landscapes [Mougenot et al., 2008].
4.3 Future investigations on visual perception in design activity
So far, most investigations on design creativity have focused the visualization and use by designers of images of
manipulable objects, being intra-domain or inter-domain precedents. Extending former studies in design science
and based on findings on brain processing, our hypothesis is that design creativity is influenced by the type of
images visualized by designers : manipulable vs. non-manipulable objects. A sub-hypothesis is that the
visualization of highly-contextualized images (scenes, pictures with a high level of abstraction) would lead to a
higher level of creativity. To test this hypothesis, our future experiment will rely on methods from both design
science (protocol analysis, interviews, sketches assessment) and cognitive science (measuring body and brain
activity), as explained in table 4. We propose to investigate the implicit processes in designing activities by using
eye-tracking, motion capture, digital pen and tablet, and brain imaging devices, in combination with careful
observations and interviews on the explicit process.
Table 4 : Characteristics of investigations on explicit and implicit processes of design activity
Part of design activity
Typical observations
Methods / tools
Experimenters
Explicit process
Browsing images
Sketching creative outputs
Observations, interviews,
sketches analyses
Design scientists mainly
Implicit process
Visual perception
Analogical reasoning
Emotional arousal
Eyes-tracking, motioncapture, brain imaging,
fMRI, ERP
Cognitive scientists and
neuroscientists mainly
The experiment variable will be the content of images: sets of images with various types of content (living
objects, manipulable objects, scenes) will be used to identify possible effects onto creativity. While the subjects
are engaging in design tasks, actual strokes in sketches and eye movements will be analyzed with manipulations
of visual materials of different kinds. During the experiment, body and eye movements will be recorded and
related to the time when subjects experience inspirations, to find implicit signatures of creativity.
5. Conclusion
So far, most design studies, included our work, investigated the explicit design process by observing external
pieces of evidence of designers’ work: for instance, to evaluate design creativity, usually visible external
representations (sketches) are collected and assessed by judges. From the visualization of inspirational images to
the production of sketches, inputs and outputs of the design informational process usually are tangible
components, easily captured and assessed. But design process involves many highly complex cognitive
operations; we proposed then to investigate further these cognitive operations and to study in-depth components
of designers’ creativity such as visual attention and visual perception from the points of view of both design
scientist and cognitive scientist. More specifically, we propose that further studies should investigate the effect
of the content of images visualized by designers onto design creativity, including not only images of design
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precedents but also images of scenes. Bridging design studies and cognitive science is highly relevant when
aiming at a comprehensive knowledge of design process; therefore future design investigations jointly carried
out by both design and cognition scientists are expected to bring knowledge on implicit process of design
activity and specifically on the link between visual perception and creativity.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express their gratitude to the European Commission which supported TRENDS
Project through the 6th Framework Program for Information Society Technologies (2006-2008) and to the
Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, funding the first author 's current fellowship (2009-2011).
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