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Title: From Information to Ideas: How Designers Structure Information to Support Idea Generation
Design can be seen as a series of decisions that are informed by information that the designer has gathered from the environment and transformed into actionable knowledge. The sheer volume and variety of available information compels designers to impose structure upon the desired information, which in turn may affect subsequent design activities. To better understand how information may inform design decisions, this study investigates the relationship between designers’ information organization behaviors and their generated ideas by recruiting eight professionals (four from software design and four from graphic design) for individual 3-hour design sessions. They were asked to generate ideas for a design problem (reducing pedestrian accidents in Nebraska) using the provided information. Results reveal that designers structured the information in three different ways (Clusters, Relations, and Nests), and both designer background and organizational strategy display different roles in the features generated in their ideas.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1755864
PAR ID:
10281920
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Design Engineering Technical Conferences
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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