State of the Art in Designers’ Cognitive Activities and Computational Support: With Emphasis on the Information Categorization in the Early Stages of Design

Abstract

Nowadays, the growth of interest is the analysis of designers’ cognitive activities [2]- [10].This interest has become a major interdisciplinary topic not only in design science, but also in cognitive psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence. In this context, the analysis of the designer’s cognitive activity aims to describe more clearly the mental strategies for solving design problems and to develop computational tools to support designers in the early stages of design. Insofar as much design research depends on findings from empirical studies [11], the results of these studies have shown neglected the cognitive aspects involving in construction, categorization and effective application of design information for idea generation in the early stages of design which is relatively implicit. So, in this paper, we provide the state of the art in designers’ cognitive activities and computational support with emphasis on the information categorization in the early stages of design through a review of a wide range of literature. We also present a case study of the ‘TRENDS’ system which is positioned in the core of these research tendency. Finally, we discuss the limitations of current research and perspectives for the further work.