This paper takes the approach that designing is situated and that concepts are formed as a consequence od the this situatedness of designing. The papers presents a framework for concept formation that draws on a structure of a a design agent that includes sensors, perceptors and conceptors that interact with each other and the external and internal environment of the agent to produce the situation that is a contingent basis for the formation and use of concepts.

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

Sketches are produced in many domains to communicate with self or others. They are a kind of external representation serving as a cognitive tool to augment memory and information processing by relieving the mind of some of those burdens. Sketches schematize. They do not portray reality; rather they convey conceptions of reality. Sketches use elements and spatial relations on paper to represent elements and spatial or abstract relations in the domain of interest. They incorporate relevant information and omit irrelevant. As such, they reveal people's conceptions of domains.. An analysis of sketches of routes, for example, reveals that they segment routes around action points, typically turns. Order of drawing reflects mental organization of the domain. From sketches, novices extract structural information about the spatial relations among elements. Experts are also able to extract functional information, information that must be inferred from rather than directly extracted from sketches.

Creative products are generally recognised as satisfying two requirements: firstly they are useful, and secondly they are novel. Much effort in AI and design computing has been put into developing systems that can recognise the usefulness of the products that they generate. In contrast, the work presented in this thesis has concentrated on developing computational systems that are able to recognise the novelty of their work. The research has shown that when computational systems are given the ability to recognise both the novelty and the usefulness of their products they gain a level of autonomy that opens up new possibilities for the study of creative behaviour in single agents and the emergence of social creativity in multi-agent systems. The work

This paper is concerned with the motivation of design agents to promote the exploration of design spaces. A general form of motivation common to designers is a curiosity to discover interesting designs. This paper presents computational models of interest and curiosity based on the detection of novelty. We illustrate the behaviour of our model of interest by developing a design agent that is motivated to explore the effects of emergent crowd behaviours on the performance of doorways.

. This paper introduces the concept of constructive memory as a framework for the modeling of design thinking. It describes some recent results from empirical studies of designing to show a gap exists between our models of designing and these results. The paper presents constructive memory and its associated concept of situatedness as potential foundations for increasing our understanding of design thinking. Keywords. Constructive memory, emergence, situatedness, models of designing, design theory. Introduction Models of designing have largely been founded on either introspection or extrospection. There has been insufficient experimental data on the phenomenon we call "designing" to provide a solid empirical foundation on which to found both theories and models. Of course, this has not prevented researchers from positing both theories and models of designing. (We will use the word "designing" as the verb and "design" and the noun; rather than using context to disambiguate the m...

this paper is to encourage people engaged in the software development process to pay more attention to the aesthetics at an early stage. Aesthetic concerns will improve both usability and other goals that the application may have. Example We will now look at an example from the web. A stock trading site that guides the users by making use of colour. The two orange tabs near the top of the page are probably the first elements on the page that people notice. See fig 1. The left one guides the newcomers to the possibility of becoming a customer, ("Bli kund"). And the returning users are directed to the login function ("Logga in") by the right tab. Because of the deliberately focused and "clean" design the visitor might also get an impression of the web site as one that is speedy and accurate. The same form element, or sign, supports several functions. The design both guides the user and gives her/him an impression. The conscious designer knows that we often start by looking at the top of a page and that orange attracts attention. He has also chosen a typeface that fits into the same style as the rest of the site. If the typeface is not what you expect, it will attract your attention, distract you in your action and destroy the impression of speed, which was one of the goals for this site. Character What we look at or use always gives us an impression. We construct a character that we associate with the artefact as soon as we encounter it. [Constructing a character is] "one of the basic abilities human beings has evolved in dealing with each other and things in their environment." (Janlert, et al. p.314) This is inevitable but we are perhaps not always aware of it. What impressions we get depends on our previous experience, our culture, the context, etc. These impressions...

. 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 ...

genetic algorithms

Abstract. Can artificial systems be creative? Can they be designed to be creative on their own? And what are the requirements of such creative artificial systems? To be able to support humans who are expected to deliver creative solutions, or to automate part of their tasks, this paper presents a proposal for creativity requirements that provide a basis for designing creative artificial systems.