The creative outcome of a design process hinges on whether or not designers are able to find important aspects of a given problem and thereby invent design issues or requirements during the process. How do they do this? What becomes the impetus for the invention of important issues or requirements? Socalled "unexpected discoveries", the acts of attending to visuo-spatial features in sketches which were not intended when they were drawn, are believed to contribute to it. The purpose of the present research is to verify this hypothesis. Analysing the cognitive processes of a practising architect in a design session, we found that in about a half of his entire design process there was bi-directional causality between unexpected discoveries and the invention of issues or requirements; not only did unexpected discoveries become the driving force for invention, but also the occurrence of invention, in turn, tended to cause new unexpected discoveries. This has pedagogical implications.

There is widespread anecdotal evidence that expert programmers make use of visual mental images when they are designing programs. This evidence is used to justify the use of diagrams and visual programming languages during software design. This paper reports the results of two studies. In the first, expert programmers were directly questioned regarding the nature of their mental representations while they were engaged in a design task. This investigative technique was used with the explicit intention of eliciting introspective reports of mental imagery. In the second, users of a visual programming language responded to a questionnaire in which they were asked about cognitive processes. The resulting transcripts displayed a considerable number of common elements. These suggest that software design shares many characteristics of more concrete design disciplines. The reports from participants in the two studies, together with previous research into imagery use, indicate potential...

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External representations such as diagrams, sketches, charts, graphs and scribbles on napkins play facilitatory roles in inference, problem-solving and understanding (e.g. [1],[2],[3],[4],[5],[6],[7],[8],[9]). How does the externality and visibility of representations facilitate inference and problem-solving? One benefit of external representations is on memory. They reduce working memory load by providing external tokens for the elements that must otherwise be kept in mind. This frees working memory to perform mental calculations on the elements rather than both keeping elements in mind and operating on them [2],[9]. External representations also serve as visuo-spatial retrieval cues for long term memory, evoking relevant information that might not otherwise be retrieved. Another benefit of external representations is to promote discovery and inference, both visuo-spatial and metaphorical. Perceptual judgements about size, distance, and direction are easily made from external representations (e.g.[4]). In a Venn diagram, set relations such as inclusion are abstractly mapped onto visuo-spatial diagrammatic features, enabling direct perceptual calculation. Visuo-spatial features such as proximity, connectivity, and alignment provide useful hints to selection of appropriate inference

Modern computer systems routinely present information to the user as a combination of text and diagrammatic images, described as "graphical user interfaces". Practitioners and researchers in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) generally believe that the value of these diagrammatic representations is derived from metaphorical reasoning; they communicate abstract information by depicting a physical situation from which the abstractions can be inferred. This assumption has been prevalent in HCI research for over 20 years, but has seldom been tested experimentally. This thesis analyses the reasons why diagrams are believed to assist with abstract reasoning. It then presents the results of a series of experiments testing the contribution of metaphor to comprehension, problem solving, explanation and memory tasks carried out using a range of different diagrams. The results indicate that explicit metaphors provide surprisingly little benefit for cognitive tasks using diagrams as an external re...

Abstract: Analysis of results of design protocols of novice and expert designers, although based on a limited number of designers, has shown that there are differences in the balance of cognitive actions between them. In this paper, we investigate the possible reasons for this imbalance in cognitive activity between the novice and expert designers in the rate of information processing driven by their relative experience in drawing production and sketch recognition. We use the theory of mental imagery to explain these differences. 1.

. This paper focuses on the differences in visual reasoning between a novice and an expert architectural designer during the conceptual design process. The cognitive actions of each designer while sketching were categorized into four main groups (each consisting of a number of sub-groups): physical, perceptual, functional, and conceptual. Based on this analysis, we found that the expert differs markedly from the novice in productivity in terms of the number of sketches and the number of alternative ideas. We focused on the differences between them in terms of the frequencies of cognitive actions, with the hypothesis that the difference in productivity could be attributed to the differences in some or all types of cognitive actions. Differences between the expert and the novice were found for revising features (in the subcategory of drawing actions in the physical action category), for paying attention to the relations of depicted elements (perceptual category) and for the rates of new ...

Abstract. Diagrams are an effective means of conveying concrete, abstract or symbolic information about systems. Here, individuals or pairs of participants produced assembly instructions after assembling an object. When working individually, nearly all participants used a combination of text and diagrams. Those high in spatial ability produced the step-by-step action diagrams that in later studies were rated higher by all and improved performance of low ability participants. In a second experiment, pairs of participants assembled the object and produced instructions jointly. Pairs assembled the object faster and more accurately than individuals. Surprisingly, in the instructions produced, fewer than half the dyads used diagrams, and dyads produced fewer of the more effective diagrams. We speculate that the social verbal nature of the interactions of pairs encouraged verbal instructions. 1

Using concepts from creative cognition this paper proposes a cognitive method to measure potential creativity in designing. The empirical data from protocol studies presents examples of the measurement of the novelty, value, and unpredictability in the different cognitive levels. Finally, we propose a model of creativity and designing as situated.

Abstract: This paper describes our methodology in providing designers with a new advanced 3D modeling Human-Computer Interaction. The main project – called GINA, a French acronym for Interactive and Natural Geometry – expect to introduce new intuitive and creative 3D modeling tools, relying on 2D perspective drawing reconstruction. We present here the user study we conducted and the implications of this study on the interface of GINA.